[{"content":" Stay up to date with the latest talks, events, workshops, and news from the ChinaComx project. ","date":"4 May 2026","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/activities/","section":"Activities","summary":" Stay up to date with the latest talks, events, workshops, and news from the ChinaComx project. ","title":"Activities","type":"activities"},{"content":" With the semicentennial of the first Star Wars approaching in 2027, it is evident that few other Hollywood blockbusters enjoy such broad cultural appeal and wide academic interest as Star Wars. In all of this and much more scholarly literature, however, one theme and region is conspicuously absent: China.\nThe edited volume Chinese Star Wars: Vernacular Readings of a Global Multimedia Phenomenon sets out to shed more light on exactly these aspects. We invite contributions that explore the interplay between the larger Star Wars universe(s) and the Chinese (re)production, consumption, and reception of it over the decades following 1977. We particularly welcome case studies and detailed explorations of overlooked artifacts, whether material or symbolic, as well as studies based on oral history. Transcultural approaches that critically engage with Chinese Star Wars phenomena are also highly encouraged.\nRead the full call for papers below, or get it in PDF here.\nWe aim for a balanced mix of academic rigor and engaging, insightful explorations of Star Wars lore “with Chinese characteristics.” Contributions should maintain an academic standard while also embracing a self-aware appreciation for the unique and often compelling nature of this transcultural phenomenon.\nWhile we are particularly keen to include papers that make use of Chinese language primary source materials, we are also open to contributions from scholars with areas of expertise outside of Chinese studies who nonetheless are interested in exploring Chinese Star Wars realms.\nPlease submit your proposal (300 words), alongside your name, email, affiliation, and short bio (100 words), here. You can also use the form to get in touch with us in case of questions of inquiries.\nAbstracts and other inquiries are welcome until Monday, 10 August 2026. We will inform you about acceptance by Monday, 31 August 2026; first chapter drafts are expected by Monday, 4 January 2027.\nWe intend to publish the edited volume as part of a designed publication series on the politics and practices of reading culture in China with a major academic publisher (preliminary spoken agreement reached) following a blind peer review system. We also hope to organize an online workshop and/or conference panel/roundtable with all contributors in the advanced stages of research and writing for an enhanced cohesion among the chapters.\nCall for Papers # Chinese Star Wars: Vernacular Readings of a Global Multimedia Phenomenon # edited by Damian Mandzunowski (Heidelberg University) and Nick Stember (Independent Scholar) # With the semicentennial of the first Star Wars approaching in 2027, it is evident that few other Hollywood blockbusters enjoy such broad cultural appeal and wide academic interest as Star Wars. Whether its initial iteration or one of the many sequels, prequels, TV shows, and spin-offs, hundreds of academic texts have analyzed Star Wars from a variety of angles: as modern myth (Gordon 1978, Hirschman 1987); as a lens for understanding American political culture in the context of the Gulf War (Meyer 1992); as a case study for discussing global circulations of morality discourses (Vaidya 2019); as a problematic example of cultural appropriation (Wetmore 2000, Kupis 2020); or as a site for the “grassroots creativity” of fans (Jenkins 2012. In all of this and much more scholarly literature, however, one theme and region is conspicuously absent: China. Exemplary studies do exist. Through translations and scans, Maggie Greene (2014) and Nick Stember (2015) have popularized some of the early-1980s bootleg Chinese Star Wars comics; Thomas Bini (2022) provides a comprehensive annotated overview of these and other titles, with reference to his own collection of titles. Stember (2023) has further engaged in a detailed close reading of the early standalone Star Wars comics, as has Keblinska (2026). These few studies already show that the history of Star Wars in China is (as the recent edited volume Guynes and Hassler-Forest ed. 2018 suggests) inherently transmedial, tracing a fascinating trajectory from its initial encounters to its current presence. And while, within China at least, Star Wars has yet to reach equal heights of local reception as the Marvel Cinematic Universe or Japanese manga and anime franchises such as Detective Conan or One Piece, it nonetheless constitutes a fascinating case for studying the multi-layeredness of contemporary popular culture, allowing for vernacular readings — or readings which are both local and informal— across the usual culture and time divide.\nThis edited volume sets out to shed more light on exactly these aspects. We invite contributions that explore the interplay between the larger Star Wars universe(s) and the Chinese (re)production, consumption, and reception of it over the decades following 1977. We particularly welcome case studies and detailed explorations of overlooked artifacts, whether material or symbolic, as well as studies based on oral history. Transcultural approaches that critically engage with Chinese Star Wars phenomena are also highly encouraged. In its five decades, Star Wars has grown from three films into a wide-ranging multimedia franchise encompassing comic books, films, games, television, animation, and other forms of cultural expression. As such, it operates via a plethora of dissemination avenues which, by and large, need to adapt to a local context. Moreover, as a space fantasy built on tropes of knights, princesses, and feudal bloodlines, and one which is largely driven by nostalgia and legacy characters, Star Wars continues to struggle to connect with audiences in places like China, where “harder” science-fiction has historically been much more popular. At the same time, a dedicated Chinese Star Wars community exists not only in the PRC, but even more so in Hong Kong and Taiwan, with fans often favoring the Prequel Trilogy and the Expanded Universe/Legends for their intricate world-building and political narratives as well as the video games for the immersive nature, while largely ignoring the Sequel Trilogy. A study of all these processes, coupled with the diverse reception, readership, recollections, and impact (or lack thereof) of Star Wars in China, is to form the core subject of this edited volume.\nChinese Star Wars: A Force Yet to be Awakened? # It is often said that, because the first three Star Wars films—1977’s A New Hope, 1980’s The Empire Strikes Back and 1983’s The Return of the Jedi—did not receive an official theatrical release in China until 2015, Chinese audiences missed out on participating in that foundational run. And yet, the first direct interaction between a Chinese audience (albeit without the visuals) and the American space opera phenomenon did occur as early in 1979 with the official translation of Alan Dean Foster’s novelization, Splinter of the Mind’s Eye (Stember 2023). The book’s translation, alongside presumed cross border exchanges with Hong Kong and Japan where the film enjoyed a wide release, largely served as China’s vernacular foundation for a range of unauthorized lianhuanhua—Chinese picture story books or comics—published in 1980 and 1981. These and other bootleg-like comics adaptations, offer a first glimpse into creative interpretations and changes that would define one part of Chinese Star Wars ever since. While not comparable in scale and impact to the American or European contexts, there was a certain reception of Star Wars in science-fiction fans communities and it was mostly via such unofficial interactions that Star Wars, its sequels, and its comic and novel continuations gradually found their way into a re-opening China.\nDespite the continued lukewarm reception of Star Wars in China, times are also changing. Throughout the 1990s, many of the semi-official continuation books of the Expanded Universe published by Bantham and Del Rey, alongside tie-in comic book storylines published by Dark Horse and Vertigo, would be translated and published in China. Thus, when the prequel trilogy began to be released—The Phantom Menace in 1999, Attack of the Clones in 2002, and Revenge of the Sith in 2005—Lucasfilm and its distributors believed the Chinese moviegoing audiences were ready for Star Wars too. And although this succeeded only partially, Star Wars still had a measured official penetration into the Chinese market (especially with through MMO video games as Star Wars: Battlefront II or Star Wars: The Old Republic), and an active and vibrant fan community emerged, primarily online (e.g., starwarsfans.cn), that has thrived since the early 2000s. Conversely, the international Star Wars fandom also began to take notice of how it is being received and remixed in China: in 2005, shortly after the theatrical release of Revenge of the Sith, a pirated DVD began to circulate and was discovered by an American fan living in Shanghai named Jeremy Winterson (Winterson 2005). Titled Star War the Third Gathers: The Backstroke of the West, the bootleg featured English subtitles of staggering inaccuracy and fast became an early meme-like internet phenomenon resulting not only in its very own Wikipedia and Fandom pages, but also a dedicated, fan-produced audio dub that garnered over 12.3 million views on YouTube before facing copyright strikes by Disney in 2024. The profound popularity of this early new century bootleg is only one illustration of the porous and often chaotic nature of Chinese Star Wars interactions\nIn 2015, Disney, who had bought in 2012 Lucasfilm alongside the whole Star Wars IP, had high hopes for finally conquering the Chinese box office. A special section at the Shanghai Film Festival was set up in which all six extant Star Wars films were screened, the original trilogy for the first time. A Force Awakens also performed relatively well in the Chinese box office, earning some 124 million USD of its total 2 billion USD global box office (Box Office Mojo). Moreover, the Disney era has seen pointed (even if only partially successful) attempts to expand Star Wars specifically within China through publications such as Ken Liu’s short novel The Legends of Luke Skywalker or the Chinese-only web novel Star Wars: The Vow of Silver Dawn that was serialized on Qidian. More recent spin-off series, and especially The Mandalorian, enjoyed a more measurable success in China, perhaps in parts thanks to its episodic, standalone narrative heavily influenced by classic samurai cinema (specifically the ubiquitous Lone Wolf and Cub trope). And still, subsequent streaming releases have fared exceedingly poorly. The Acolyte, for example, released in 2024, received overwhelmingly negative reviews and severe review-bombing on Douban, as has in parts 2022’s Obi-Wan Kenobi.\nIn contrast, during the same period since 1977 all Star Wars films were widely screened in Taiwan and Hong Kong, as were local translations of comics and books published and circulated, creating a lively local Star Wars subculture. Especially cosplay is a very popular expression of the Star Wars fan community in Taiwan, where “May the 4th” is celebrated with large gatherings (Scanlan 2025). Mandarin language dubs of the new television series have been produced for this market by Disney, and there is even a local (non-official) producer of lightsaber replicas, the “superfan” Makoto Tsai (OCAC News 2023). In Hong Kong, meanwhile, in 2015 the Hyperspace Mountain attraction at Hong Kong Disneyland has been reworked to have a Star Wars theme. This is in marked contrast to Shanghai Disneyland, which closed its Star Wars Launch Bay attraction in 2019 just three years after opening, presumably due to a lack of visitors. More recently, it was announced that there would be a special Star Wars themed light show on the Hong Kong waterfront for May the 4th, with tie-in merchandise available for purchase (Marketing-Interactive 2026).\nAll this is to show that, ultimately, to explore how Star Wars was read in China is also to explore how China was read into Star Wars. In doing so, the volume aims to deflate the prevailing self-importance of much extant Star Wars academia: rather than (over)interpret the Force or downplay the politics of Star Wars, the volume is to highlight the force of Star Wars as a global political medium. Through a selection of case studied with a historical and contemporary focus ranging in interest from literature and arts to culture and politics, Chinese Star Wars also offers a showcase of how to conduct mass media scholarship when the studied mass medium is in fact not more than a niche.\nBook structure and topics of interest # We welcome papers on, but by no means limited to the following topics:\nEarly reception history: historical accounts of the earliest reception of Star Wars in Guangzhou (via Hong Kong and Macau) and its circulation through bootleg channels before official distribution—especially oral history contributions from this period;\nThe Taiwan / Hong Kong / Macau dimensions: how the reception of Star Wars differed in the larger Sinosphere, where the films received an official theatrical release;\nChinese dimensions of Star Wars cosplay culture: these could include ethnographic and/or sociological explorations via oral history interviews, participatory study, and other innovative methods, especially of the 501st Legion Chinese Garrison;\nCollecting, memorabilia, merchandise, and Star Wars toys, either from the aspect of their prominence in China, or from the point of view of their actual manufacturing, as already the very first Kenner Star Wars figures were in fact mass-produced in China;\nThe Expanded Universe in China: explorations of the role and impact of 1990s/2000s Star Wars books and comics in China;\nSocio-cultural analyses of the Prequels: studies that explore the reception of the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy in China against the backdrop of the late 1990s socio-cultural landscape;\nHomemade translations, scanlation processes, and crowdsourced subtitles: other aspects of the 1980s–2000s gray-zone Star Wars consumption, as well as the smuggling and selling of VHS, VCDs, or DVDs;\nDisney-era Star Wars: the reception of Disney-era Star Wars content, including most recent shows like Andor, and its intersections with discussions of authoritarianism in China;\nChinese web novel/web comic adaptations: analyses of official and unofficial Chinese web novel, web comic, or animated adaptations, variations, and official and unofficial expansions of the Star Wars universe;\nIndustry perspectives: contributions from individuals involved in the production side of Chinese Star Wars, including translators, poster artists, dubbers, and comic adapters;\nCritical takes: examinations of the franchise’s reception in China, including the perceived impact (or lack thereof) of the sequel trilogy and discussions surrounding issues of biases within fan communities or adaptations;\nPolitical readings: analyses of how political metaphors present in Star Wars (e.g., Vietnam War, Nuclear War, and Iraq War allusions from George Lucas’s original intent) have been received and interpreted within a Chinese context;\nLinguistic/semiotic approaches: investigations into the challenges and strategies involved in translating Star Wars’ myriad names, languages, and technical terms into Chinese.\nIP, legal structures, and legal issues and challenges: the legal landscape of Star Wars in China, with a particular focus on bootleg and/or piracy culture.\nAll other relevant topics are also welcome!\nSubmission and publication details # We intend to publish the edited volume as part of a publication series on the politics and practices of reading culture in China with a major academic publisher (preliminary spoken agreement reached) following a blind peer review system. We also hope to organize an online workshop and/or conference panel/roundtable with all contributors in the advanced stages of research and writing for an enhanced cohesion among the chapters.\nWe aim for a balanced mix of academic rigor and engaging, insightful explorations of Star Wars lore “with Chinese characteristics.” Contributions should maintain an academic standard while also embracing a self-aware appreciation for the unique and often compelling nature of this transcultural phenomenon. While we are particularly keen to include papers that make use of Chinese language primary source materials, we are also open to contributions from scholars with areas of expertise outside of Chinese studies who nonetheless are interested in exploring Chinese Star Wars realms.\nAbstracts and other inquiries are welcome until Monday, 10 August 2026. We will inform you about acceptance by Monday, 31 August 2026; first chapter drafts are expected by Monday, 4 January 2027.\nPlease submit your proposal (300 words), alongside your name, email, affiliation, and short bio (100 words), here. You can also use the form to get in touch with us in case of questions of inquiries.\nQuoted works # Bini, Thomas. (2022). \u0026ldquo;Encyclopedia of Unauthorized Star Wars Lianhuanhua.\u0026rdquo; Paradise Systems. https://paradise-systems.com/blogs/blog-posts/guide-to-unauthorized-star-wars-lianhuanhua\nBox Office Mojo. (n.d.). Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens. Retrieved from https://www.boxofficemojo.com/title/tt2488496/\nCBS News. (2015). \u0026ldquo;Taiwan engineer becomes lightsaber master craftsman.\u0026rdquo; CBS News. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/lightsaber-master-craftsman-a-fan-since-star-wars-episode-ii/\nGordon, Andrew. (1978). \u0026ldquo;Star Wars: A myth for our time.\u0026rdquo; Literature/Film Quarterly, 26(4), 314-326.\nGreene, Maggie. (2014). \u0026ldquo;A Long Time Ago in a China Far, Far Away …\u0026rdquo; Maggie Greene. https://www.mcgreene.org/archives/296\nGuynes, Sean A., \u0026amp; Hassler-Forest, Dan (Eds.). (2017). Star Wars and the history of transmedia storytelling. Amsterdam University Press.\nHirschman, Elizabeth C. (1987). \u0026ldquo;Movies as Myths: An Interpretation of Motion Picture Mythology.\u0026rdquo; In Marketing and Semiotics: New Directions in the Study of Signs for Sale, edited by Jean Umiker-Sebeok (pp. 335–374). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.\nJenkins, Henry. (2003). \u0026ldquo;Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars.\u0026rdquo; In Rethinking media change: the aesthetics of transition, edited by D. Thorburn \u0026amp; H. Jenkins. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.\nKeblinska, Julia Magdalena. (2026, forthcoming). \u0026ldquo;Reading Pulp Futures in New Era China (1978-1989).\u0026rdquo; In Chinese Comics and Their Readers: Understanding Lianhuanhua through Reading Acts, edited by Lena Henningsen and Emily Graf. London: Routledge.\nKupis, Marta. (2019). \u0026ldquo;Eastern Cultures Enter Hyperspace: Asian Interpretations in the Postmodern Fictional Universe of ‘Star Wars’.\u0026rdquo; Intercultural Relations, 2(6), 157-174.\nMarketing-Interactive. (2026). \u0026ldquo;HK to host its first Star Wars night run this May at Whampoa.\u0026rdquo; Marketing-Interactive. https://www.marketing-interactive.com/hk-to-host-its-first-star-wars-night-run-this-may-at-whampoa\nMeyer, David S. (1992). \u0026ldquo;Star wars, Star Wars, and American political culture.\u0026rdquo; Journal of Popular Culture, 26(2), 99–115.\nOCAC News. (2023). \u0026ldquo;Star Wars’ superfan builds career crafting ‘lightsabers.’\u0026rdquo; OCAC News. https://ocacnews.net/article/343659\nScanlan, Sean. (2025). \u0026ldquo;Taiwan celebrates Star Wars Day.\u0026rdquo; Taiwan News. https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/news/6101514\nStember, Nicholas. (n.d.). \u0026ldquo;Chinese Star Wars Comic, Part 1-6.\u0026rdquo; Nick Stember. https://www.nickstember.com/chinese-star-wars-comic-part-1-6/\nStember, Nicholas. (2023). Low culture fever: pulp science in Chinese comics after Mao. (Doctoral dissertation).\nVaidya, R. (2019). A cultural study of Disney’s Star Wars: theorizing circuit of culture. (Doctoral dissertation). Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.32657/10220/48571\nWetmore, Kevin J. (2000). \u0026ldquo;The Tao of ‘Star Wars’, Or, Cultural Appropriation in a Galaxy Far, Far Away.\u0026rdquo; Studies in Popular Culture, 23(1), 91-106.\nWinterson. (2005). \u0026ldquo;Episode III: Backstroke of the West.\u0026rdquo; Winterson.com. Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20170126021932/http://winterson.com/2005/06/episode-iii-backstroke-of-west.html\n","date":"4 May 2026","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/activities/2026-05-04-cfpchinesesw/","section":"Activities","summary":" With the semicentennial of the first Star Wars approaching in 2027, it is evident that few other Hollywood blockbusters enjoy such broad cultural appeal and wide academic interest as Star Wars. In all of this and much more scholarly literature, however, one theme and region is conspicuously absent: China.\nThe edited volume Chinese Star Wars: Vernacular Readings of a Global Multimedia Phenomenon sets out to shed more light on exactly these aspects. We invite contributions that explore the interplay between the larger Star Wars universe(s) and the Chinese (re)production, consumption, and reception of it over the decades following 1977. We particularly welcome case studies and detailed explorations of overlooked artifacts, whether material or symbolic, as well as studies based on oral history. Transcultural approaches that critically engage with Chinese Star Wars phenomena are also highly encouraged.\n","title":"Call for Papers for the edited volume CHINESE STAR WARS: VERNACULAR READINGS OF A GLOBAL MULTIMEDIA PHENOMENON","type":"article"},{"content":" ChinaComx: Comics Culture in the People's Republic of China A research project funded by the European Research Council (Grant agreement ID: 101088049) and located at the Centre for Asian and Transcultural Studies, Heidelberg University.\n↓ ","date":"4 May 2026","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/","section":"ChinaComx","summary":" ChinaComx: Comics Culture in the People's Republic of China A research project funded by the European Research Council (Grant agreement ID: 101088049) and located at the Centre for Asian and Transcultural Studies, Heidelberg University.\n↓ ","title":"ChinaComx","type":"home"},{"content":" Our PI, Lena Henningsen, will take part in the colloquium “Translating Comics: Between Bubbles, Cultures, and Constraints in East Asia” held at Paris Nanterre University and the National Institute of Art History (INHA), Paris, from 10 to 11 April 2026.\nThe conference explores key challenges in the translation of comics at the intersection of literature, visual semiotics, and culture. It addresses issues such as the spatial constraints of text in graphic narratives, the translation of humor and cultural references, and the role of publishing norms and censorship across different cultural contexts. Particular attention is given to translations involving Asian languages, including Chinese (manhua), Japanese (manga), and Korean (manhwa), as well as to adaptation as a form of translation.\nLena will present her talk, “Adaptation and Transmediation”, on 11 April from 15:40 to 16:15 at the INHA (Walter Benjamin Room). Her contribution forms part of a broader panel addressing translation, adaptation, and cross-media transformation in East Asian comic traditions.\nAbstract:\nAdaptation and transmedial processes are constitutive of Chinese lianhuanhua. The rise of lianhuanhua in the early 20th century was intricately linked to the business of producing comic adaptations of the latest movies; later, adaptations of film, of fiction, and other texts, including diaries, continued into the Mao era. Moreover, lianhuanhua artists consciously employed, or quoted, topoi and tropes from other fields of culture, including caricature, propaganda posters, and the visual arts more generally, ranging from traditional painting styles to modernist woodcut prints. Adaptation, thus, is transmediation. At times, it was highly didactic; adaptation also served to communicate clear political messages on distinct topics. However, with scholars of adaptation studies (Hutcheon, Sanders, or Baetens), I want to emphasize that works of adaptation are never “just” derivative works that duplicate or parrot a message communicated in the alleged original work. Rather, they need to be considered as works in their own right. In their recombination of previous elements and in their (re)interpretation of the alleged original (or, sometimes, originals), they tend to find their own voice and their own messages in their distinct combination of image and text, navigating a simplification of the text and ambivalence in the visuals. Using one literary (“Diary of a Madman” by Lu Xun), one cinematic (Norman Bethune), and one musical example (the biography of Abing, a blind street musician), I will trace these processes of adaptation and transmediation. They point, I argue, not only to a core characteristic of this form of art, but also to the wider processes of adaptation in (popular) cultural production in China.\nClick here for the program in PNG, or head over to the colloquium\u0026rsquo;s website for more information.\n","date":"27 March 2026","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/activities/2026-03-27-lenaparis/","section":"Activities","summary":" Our PI, Lena Henningsen, will take part in the colloquium “Translating Comics: Between Bubbles, Cultures, and Constraints in East Asia” held at Paris Nanterre University and the National Institute of Art History (INHA), Paris, from 10 to 11 April 2026.\nThe conference explores key challenges in the translation of comics at the intersection of literature, visual semiotics, and culture. It addresses issues such as the spatial constraints of text in graphic narratives, the translation of humor and cultural references, and the role of publishing norms and censorship across different cultural contexts. Particular attention is given to translations involving Asian languages, including Chinese (manhua), Japanese (manga), and Korean (manhwa), as well as to adaptation as a form of translation.\n","title":"Lena Henningsen to Present at the 2026 Colloquium 'Translating Comics' in Paris on 11 April","type":"article"},{"content":" ChinaComx Postdoctoral researcher, Damian Mandzunowski, will present a paper at the upcoming AAS Annual Conference 2026 in Vancouver, Canada, on Saturday, 14 March 2026, at 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM PDT in the VCC, Room 21.\nTitled \u0026ldquo;A Gallery of Villains: Standardizing Images of Enmity in Chinese Socialist Comics (Lianhuanhua),\u0026rdquo; his paper traces the evolution and political uses of villains in new socialist comics from the 1950s to the 1970s.\nPaper abstract:\nAs an organization of civil war fighters transformed into managers of a modern state, the question of who was “with us” and who was “against us” motivated the Chinese Communist Party during the initial years of the People’s Republic of China. Recent scholarship frames this Schmittian fixation on antagonism as the very essence of a Maoist political. It also corresponded to a political culture that was also intensely visual, ranging from posters, photography, and films to cartoons and comic books (lianhuanhua). This paper offers a novel analysis of how lianhuanhua served as a critical tool for codifying and disseminating the visual vocabulary of socialist enmity. Drawing on artists’ debates, drawing manuals, and internal reference books from the 1950s-1970s, I trace the development of a formalistic template for depicting “bad people”: class enemies, traitors, counterrevolutionaries, and other political adversaries. Applied and reused in scores of lianhuanhua, the comics provided concrete, recognizable narratives for a mass audience that ranged from children and the semi-literate to young workers and mothers. The medium’s role was often explicit, with comics commissioned to vilify targeted groups during political purges or to provide exemplary negative illustrations to new laws. By comparing exemplary lianhuanhua with their underlying blueprints and political instructions, this paper ultimately argues that the visual templates were a key instrument of social engineering, creating a powerful and easily understood iconography of deviance to enforce political conformity across China. By doing so, the gallery of villains aided the creation of a new socialist subject.\nDamian\u0026rsquo;s paper is part of a panel he co-organized. Titled \u0026ldquo;\u0026lsquo;Bad\u0026rsquo; People in the People’s Republic of China: Criminals, Enemies, and Villains under Mao,\u0026rdquo; in addition to Damian, the panel consists of co-organizer Puck Engman (University of California, Berkeley), Haiyan Lee (Stanford University) as Chair, Aminda Smith (Michigan State University), Wenqing Kang (Cleveland State University), and Yiwen Yvon Wang (University of Toronto) as Discussant.\nPanel abstract:\nThis panel examines the “bad people” of the early People’s Republic of China (1949-76). In this category were those finding themselves on the wrong side of the law, moral sensibilities, or in opposition to the Chinese Communist Party, revolution, and socialism. The question of who belonged here depended on constantly shifting boundaries between “good” people and “bad.” Legal experts debated whether all crimes stemmed from antagonistic contradictions “between us and them” or whether all criminals were class enemies. Consecutive mass campaigns redefined transgression and reshaped the image of the enemy. A scarcity of codified law blurred distinctions between minor misdeeds and major crimes, and in a revolutionary society aiming for the transformation of every person, the line between education and punishment was thin. The papers of this panel explore the political construction and lived experiences of various “bad people.” Puck Engman provides new estimates of China\u0026rsquo;s incarcerated population between 1949 and 1976 and discusses the implications for a new history of punishment. Wenqing Kang analyzes the criminalization of lifestyles through the case of male same-sex relations. Damian Mandzunowski unpacks the political and conceptual blueprints used to depict and identify villains in popular visual culture. Aminda Smith considers the unexpected trajectories of nationally celebrated labor models when they fell afoul of the party. As discussant, Yvon Wang will draw on his work on the history of deviance and everyday life. Haiyan Lee, who has written extensively on the legal culture and moral imagination of the PRC, will act as chair.\n","date":"9 March 2026","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/activities/2026-03-09-damianaas2026/","section":"Activities","summary":" ChinaComx Postdoctoral researcher, Damian Mandzunowski, will present a paper at the upcoming AAS Annual Conference 2026 in Vancouver, Canada, on Saturday, 14 March 2026, at 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM PDT in the VCC, Room 21.\nTitled “A Gallery of Villains: Standardizing Images of Enmity in Chinese Socialist Comics (Lianhuanhua),” his paper traces the evolution and political uses of villains in new socialist comics from the 1950s to the 1970s.\n","title":"Damian Mandzunowski to take part in the AAS Annual Conference 2026 in Vancouver","type":"article"},{"content":" ChinaComx PI Lena Henningsen presented the work of the project and her own research at the University of Mainz/Germersheim last week. In her presentation for colleagues and students from the Department of Translation at Uni Mainz, Lena gave an overview of the ChinaComx project and why lianhuanhua were so popular in China. Her talk is titled “Unterhaltung, Bildung und Propaganda im Comic? Geschichte und Entwicklung der chinesischen Lianhuanhua 连环画”.\nTo read Lena’s recent research on Lu Xun and lianhuanhua, please click here; to learn more about the ChinaComx project, please click here.\n","date":"10 February 2026","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/activities/2026-02-10-lenamainz/","section":"Activities","summary":" ChinaComx PI Lena Henningsen presented the work of the project and her own research at the University of Mainz/Germersheim last week. In her presentation for colleagues and students from the Department of Translation at Uni Mainz, Lena gave an overview of the ChinaComx project and why lianhuanhua were so popular in China. Her talk is titled “Unterhaltung, Bildung und Propaganda im Comic? Geschichte und Entwicklung der chinesischen Lianhuanhua 连环画”.\n","title":"Lena Henningsen Gave a Talk on Lianhuanhua at the University of Mainz on 4 February","type":"article"},{"content":" ChinaComx PhD candidate Aijia Zhang is to take part in the Hong Kong Association for Digital Humanities 2026 Conference this January. Hosted by The Chinese University of Hong Kong on 23-25 January 2026, the event explores digital humanities in the era of AI.\nIn her panel “Image Synthesis, Immersion \u0026amp; Multimodality” (16:30–18:30) on 23 January, Aijia will share her current research titled “Lianhuanhua in the Age of AI: Multimodality, Distant Perceiving, and the Ethics”. She examines the potential lianhuanhua offered to the digital humanities with its multimodal nature, and discusses her practices of using AI in digital humanities research. Reflecting on her previous projects on the texts and images of over 300 lianhuanhua, her talk explores how AI increases the efficiency in data normalization and preparation while raising potential problems. Using concrete examples, she shares her attempts at applying AI in research while keeping track of the obscurity in models and algorithms.\n","date":"20 January 2026","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/activities/2026-01-23-aijiahongkong/","section":"Activities","summary":" ChinaComx PhD candidate Aijia Zhang is to take part in the Hong Kong Association for Digital Humanities 2026 Conference this January. Hosted by The Chinese University of Hong Kong on 23-25 January 2026, the event explores digital humanities in the era of AI.\nIn her panel “Image Synthesis, Immersion \u0026 Multimodality” (16:30–18:30) on 23 January, Aijia will share her current research titled “Lianhuanhua in the Age of AI: Multimodality, Distant Perceiving, and the Ethics”. She examines the potential lianhuanhua offered to the digital humanities with its multimodal nature, and discusses her practices of using AI in digital humanities research. Reflecting on her previous projects on the texts and images of over 300 lianhuanhua, her talk explores how AI increases the efficiency in data normalization and preparation while raising potential problems. Using concrete examples, she shares her attempts at applying AI in research while keeping track of the obscurity in models and algorithms.\n","title":"Aijia Zhang to Present on Lianhuanhua and Digital Humanities at The Chinese University of Hong Kong on 23 January","type":"article"},{"content":" ChinaComx PhD candidate Astrid Y. Xiao will head to Venice this November to share her research at the international conference Eating Indoors and Outdoors in Children’s Literature. Hosted by Ca’ Foscari University on 27–28 November 2025, the event explores how food and eating spaces appear in children’s stories across cultures.\nAstrid will speak in the panel “Knowing Your Onions: Foraging Spaces” (16:15–17:45) on 28 November, chaired by Carolina C. Granini. Her presentation, titled “Edible Lessons: Moral Topographies of Food in Chinese Children’s Comics”, examines how food and eating spaces were depicted in lianhuanhua during Mao-era China. Through close readings of images and narratives of intimate spots in the vineyard and outdoor spaces for communal picnics, her talk explores how everyday food practices became tools for political pedagogy. She argues that these small, ordinary moments around meals were mobilized to cultivate socialist virtues such as collectivism and disciplined desire. In tracing these “edible moral landscapes,” the presentation shows how children’s visual culture shaped not only notions of nourishment but also broader ideas of morality and ideological belonging.\n","date":"22 November 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/activities/2025-11-22-astridvenice/","section":"Activities","summary":" ChinaComx PhD candidate Astrid Y. Xiao will head to Venice this November to share her research at the international conference Eating Indoors and Outdoors in Children’s Literature. Hosted by Ca’ Foscari University on 27–28 November 2025, the event explores how food and eating spaces appear in children’s stories across cultures.\nAstrid will speak in the panel “Knowing Your Onions: Foraging Spaces” (16:15–17:45) on 28 November, chaired by Carolina C. Granini. Her presentation, titled “Edible Lessons: Moral Topographies of Food in Chinese Children’s Comics”, examines how food and eating spaces were depicted in lianhuanhua during Mao-era China. Through close readings of images and narratives of intimate spots in the vineyard and outdoor spaces for communal picnics, her talk explores how everyday food practices became tools for political pedagogy. She argues that these small, ordinary moments around meals were mobilized to cultivate socialist virtues such as collectivism and disciplined desire. In tracing these “edible moral landscapes,” the presentation shows how children’s visual culture shaped not only notions of nourishment but also broader ideas of morality and ideological belonging.\n","title":"Astrid Y. Xiao to Present on Food and Lianhuanhua on 28 November at Ca’ Foscari University, Venice","type":"article"},{"content":" ChinaComx PI Lena Henningsen and postdoc researcher Damian Mandzunowski will present their latest work at the XXXVI Annual Conference of the German Association for Chinese Studies (Die Deutsche Vereinigung für Chinastudien e. V., DVCS), titled “Self-Images – Images of the Other (Selbstbilder – Fremdbilder)”, held from 21–23 November 2025 at the Asia Africa Institute of the University of Hamburg.\nThe talks are about villains and heroes and their depictions in lianhuanhua, and they both take place on Friday, 21 November, in Panel 3: Literatur und Medien I (15:30–17:00), chaired by Emily Graf. At 16:00, Lena Henningsen will present her paper “Author, Media Star, Icon, or Revolutionary: Images of Lu Xun in Lianhuanhua (Autor, Medienstar, Ikone oder Revolutionär: Fremdbilder von Lu Xun in Lianhuanhua)”. She is followed at 16:30 by Damian Mandzunowski, whose talk “What Do Our Enemies Look Like? The Construction of Images of Others in Mao-Era Socialist Comics (lianhuanhua) (Wie sehen unsere Feinde aus? Die Konstruktion von Fremdbildern in sozialistischen Comics (lianhuanhua) der Mao‐Ära)”.\nFor the full conference program, click here, and read on for the two presentation abstracts in German below:\nLena Henningsen: Autor, Medienstar, Ikone oder Revolutionär: Fremdbilder von Lu Xun in Lianhuanhua: # Lu Xun ist einer der intellektuellen Superstars des frühen chinesischen Jahrhunderts: Autor von modernen, ambivalenten Kurzgeschichten und Essays, von nuancierten, oft kritischen Gedichten; Übersetzer, Publizist, Förderer anderer Künstler und Künste, etwa des avantgardistischen Holzdrucks. Er war aber auch ein begnadeter “cultural entrepreneur” und wusste, das öffentliche mediale Bild von sich selbst zu gestalten, intellektuell wie visuell. Neben seinen Schriften sind daher auch Fotographien von Lu Xun erhalten. Damit hinterließ er der Nachwelt umfangreiches Material, sich ihr eigenes Bild von ihm zu machen. In diesem Beitrag werde ich daher die Fremdbilder beleuchten, die von Lu Xun in ca. 100 Lianhuanhua gestaltet wurden, allesamt Adaptionen des Lebens und Schreibens von Lu Xun. Diese Lianhuanhua authentifizieren sich mit klaren Verweisen auf Texte von Lu Xun und mit intermedialen Verweisen, etwa auf bekannte Fotographien. Ähnlich wie in anderen Medien (von den Yananer Reden bis hin zu Propagandapostern) wird Lu Xun während der Mao-Zeit als Schriftsteller dargestellt, der mit seinem Pinsel gegen die Feinde der Kommunisten kämpft. Trotz massiver Kürzungen und Vereinfachung seiner Texte, die den Bedingungen des Mediums geschuldet sind, scheinen noch Ambivalenzen in den Adaptationen durch, gerade auf der Bildebene. Nach der Kulturrevolution treten diese Mehrdeutigkeiten in den Adaptionen noch stärker zuvor und lassen Lianhuanhua-Künstler ihr künstlerisches Selbstverständnis und das während der Kulturrevolution erlittene Leid reflektieren. Hiermit werde ich zweierlei zeigen: Erstens, dass die Ambivalenzen in Lu Xuns Werken gerade auch zu Zeiten intensiver ideologischer Verengung weiterhin sichtbar blieben, und zweitens, dass Lianhuanhua zwar ganz klar ein Teil des Propaganda-Systems der VR China waren, mit denen Wissen, aber auch die korrekte Ideologie vermittelt werden sollten – dass diese beliebten Comics aber immer Künstlern wie Lesern dazu einluden, über die Grenzen des Sagbaren hinaus nachzudenken. Die Transformation der wirkmächtigen Eigenbilder von Lu Xun in Fremdbilder zeigt dies eindrücklich.\nDamian Mandzunowski: Wie sehen unsere Feinde aus? Die Konstruktion von Fremdbildern in sozialistischen Comics (lianhuanhua) der Mao‐Ära # „Wer sind unsere Feinde? Wer sind unsere Freunde? Das ist eine Frage, die für die Revolution erstrangige Bedeutung hat.“ Diese bereits 1926 von Mao Zedong formulierte Maxime wurde nach der Gründung der Volksrepublik China 1949 zur Grundlage einer systematischen Aufspaltung der Gesellschaft in Freunde und Feinde. Auch wenn nicht alle Fremde sofort Feinde waren, war dennoch solch ein Freund-Feind-Denken, das Mao 1957 als Konzept der „antagonistischen Widersprüche“ erneut theoretisch untermauerte, ein zentrales Element des maoistischen Denken über Fremde: die Formierung eines neuen sozialistischen Subjekts und Kollektivs war schlechthin untrennbar mit der Abgrenzung von ihren „Anderen“ verbunden. Dieser Beitrag greift die symbiotische Dichotomie von Selbst-/Fremd- und Feind-/Freundbildern auf, indem untersucht wird, wie chinesische Comics (lianhuanhua) durch eine visuelle Konstruktion von Fremdbildern ein ebenso klares revolutionäres Selbstbild schufen. Anhand von Debatten in Comic-Zeitschriften zwischen de 1950er- und den 1980er-Jahren und Anleitungen zum Zeichnen sowie internen Referenzmaterialien wird nachgezeichnet, wie ein standardisiertes visuelles Vokabular zur Darstellung von Klassenfeinden, Reaktionären, Verrätern und ausländischen Gegnern entwickelt wurde. Durch eine Analyse exemplarischer Comics im Kontext ihrer Entstehung zeigt der Beitrag nicht zuletzt, wie das konstruierte Feindbild gezielt zur Affirmation des sozialistischen Staates und seiner Subjekte diente. Die dargestellten Antagonisten fungierten als negative Vorlage, die im Umkehrschluss die Tugenden des idealen sozialistischen Bürgers – das erwünschte maoistische Selbstbild – umso deutlicher positiv hervorhob.\n","date":"18 November 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/activities/2025-11-19-lenadamiandvcs2026/","section":"Activities","summary":" ChinaComx PI Lena Henningsen and postdoc researcher Damian Mandzunowski will present their latest work at the XXXVI Annual Conference of the German Association for Chinese Studies (Die Deutsche Vereinigung für Chinastudien e. V., DVCS), titled “Self-Images – Images of the Other (Selbstbilder – Fremdbilder)”, held from 21–23 November 2025 at the Asia Africa Institute of the University of Hamburg.\nThe talks are about villains and heroes and their depictions in lianhuanhua, and they both take place on Friday, 21 November, in Panel 3: Literatur und Medien I (15:30–17:00), chaired by Emily Graf. At 16:00, Lena Henningsen will present her paper “Author, Media Star, Icon, or Revolutionary: Images of Lu Xun in Lianhuanhua (Autor, Medienstar, Ikone oder Revolutionär: Fremdbilder von Lu Xun in Lianhuanhua)”. She is followed at 16:30 by Damian Mandzunowski, whose talk “What Do Our Enemies Look Like? The Construction of Images of Others in Mao-Era Socialist Comics (lianhuanhua) (Wie sehen unsere Feinde aus? Die Konstruktion von Fremdbildern in sozialistischen Comics (lianhuanhua) der Mao‐Ära)”.\n","title":"Lena Henningsen and Damian Mandzunowski to Present at the 2025 DVCS Conference in Hamburg on 21 November","type":"article"},{"content":" The ChinaComx project is thrilled to welcome John A. Crespi, Professor of Chinese and Asian Studies at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, and author of Manhua Modernity: Chinese Culture and the Pictorial Turn (University of California Press, 2020)—available open access here!—for a guest lecture titled \u0026ldquo;Chinese Comics in Context: Scanlating Manhua from the Jazz Age to the Mao Era.\nThe talk will take place on 17 November in CATS 010.00.01 from 4 p.m.\nAbstract of the talk:\nScanlation—the process of scanning foreign comics and translating into another language—originated among fans of Japanese manga. This talk presents the challenges and discoveries of scanlating, cover-to-cover, 20th-century Chinese cartoon and comics publications, from Shanghai Jazz Age illustrated weeklies to wartime propaganda magazines and Mao-period satire monthlies. Much more than simply cutting and pasting, scanlating full issues of period magazines entails a host of aesthetic and cultural issues that offer insights into how cartoons and comics inhabited print media and how to approach these materials in their original sources.\nWe are looking forward to it!\n","date":"3 November 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/activities/2025-11-03-crespitalkheidelberg/","section":"Activities","summary":" The ChinaComx project is thrilled to welcome John A. Crespi, Professor of Chinese and Asian Studies at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, and author of Manhua Modernity: Chinese Culture and the Pictorial Turn (University of California Press, 2020)—available open access here!—for a guest lecture titled “Chinese Comics in Context: Scanlating Manhua from the Jazz Age to the Mao Era.\nThe talk will take place on 17 November in CATS 010.00.01 from 4 p.m.\n","title":"John A. Crespi (Colgate) to Deliver Guest Lecture in Heidelberg on 17 November","type":"article"},{"content":" The 2025 International Week and International Cultural Festival of the School of Humanities, Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU) will be held from 10-16 October 2025. ChinaComx PI Lena Henningsen and Phd Candidate Jiu Song are invited to present their recent research on lianhuanhua at this event.\nJiu Song will present from 17:20 to 17:55 on 10 October, the first day of CATS-SJTU International Graduate Student Conference 2025. She is the last presenter of the Second Group with the topic Worldmaking through Revolutions and the International. Building on her ongoing PhD project, her presentation is titled Visual Narratives and Revolutionary Memory: Reader Reception and Worldmaking in Chinese Lianhuanhua (1950s-1980s). The talk examines how revolutionary-themed lianhuanhua (palm-sized picture-story books) translated recent history into compelling visual narratives and helped organize cultural memory. Drawing on archival materials, reader feedback, and a close look at the planned—but ultimately unpublished—adaptation of Seaman Zhu Baoting, Song shows how editorial guidance shaped the visual grammar of heroism, struggle, and moral resolution. A brief comparative glimpse at the iconic series Railroad Guerrillas highlights fieldwork-driven craft, iterative refinement, and wide readership. Throughout, the talk leverages worldmaking and cultural-memory frameworks to argue that lianhuanhua functioned as accessible, resonant media that connected historical experience with everyday ethical practice—past and present.\nLena Henningsen will participate in the academic dialogue from 14:30 to 17:30 on 14 October, and her talk is titled Gained in Adaptation: Lu Xun and his Fiction in Lianhuanhua Adaptation. She will demonstrate that adaptation and transmedial processes are constitutive for Chinese lianhuanhua. After all, the rise of lianhuanhua in the early 20th century was intricately linked to the business of producing comic adaptations of the latest movies; later, adaptations of film, of fiction and other texts including diaries continued into the lianhuanhua field of the Mao era. Moreover, lianhuanhua artists consciously employed, or quoted, topoi and tropes from other fields of culture, including caricature, propaganda posters and the visual arts more general ranging from traditional painting styles to modernist woodcut.\nIn this presentation, she will therefore trace the purposes, styles and effects of adaptation across lianhuanhua production of the 20th century focusing on lianhuanhua that adapt the fiction or the biography of Lu Xun. While lianhuanhua that are adapted from literary texts may seem to have flattened or oversimplified the original text, very often, the visuals add new ambivalence into the story, thus updating the original work into the present context. Acknowledging the importance of adaptation for the lianhuanhua genre thus not only points to a core characteristic of this form of art, but also to the wider processes of adaptation in (popular) cultural production in China.\n","date":"5 October 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/activities/2025-10-10-lenajiushanghai/","section":"Activities","summary":" The 2025 International Week and International Cultural Festival of the School of Humanities, Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU) will be held from 10-16 October 2025. ChinaComx PI Lena Henningsen and Phd Candidate Jiu Song are invited to present their recent research on lianhuanhua at this event.\nJiu Song will present from 17:20 to 17:55 on 10 October, the first day of CATS-SJTU International Graduate Student Conference 2025. She is the last presenter of the Second Group with the topic Worldmaking through Revolutions and the International. Building on her ongoing PhD project, her presentation is titled Visual Narratives and Revolutionary Memory: Reader Reception and Worldmaking in Chinese Lianhuanhua (1950s-1980s). The talk examines how revolutionary-themed lianhuanhua (palm-sized picture-story books) translated recent history into compelling visual narratives and helped organize cultural memory. Drawing on archival materials, reader feedback, and a close look at the planned—but ultimately unpublished—adaptation of Seaman Zhu Baoting, Song shows how editorial guidance shaped the visual grammar of heroism, struggle, and moral resolution. A brief comparative glimpse at the iconic series Railroad Guerrillas highlights fieldwork-driven craft, iterative refinement, and wide readership. Throughout, the talk leverages worldmaking and cultural-memory frameworks to argue that lianhuanhua functioned as accessible, resonant media that connected historical experience with everyday ethical practice—past and present.\n","title":"Lena Henningsen and Jiu Song to Present on Lianhuanhua at Shanghai Jiao Tong University on 10 and 14 October","type":"article"},{"content":" On September 26-28, 2025, ChinaComx Phd Candidate Jiu Song will attend the 18th Next-Generation Global Workshop at Kyoto University, Japan. The workshop is organized by the Kyoto University Asian Studies Unit (KUASU) under the theme “Visual Media in a Post-Growth Era.”\nWhile her earlier presentations on younger generations focused mainly on questions of memory and intergenerational transmission, this time her research places greater emphasis on the ways in which visual media themselves shape and articulate identity. By addressing how visual forms and digital platforms mediate the reappropriation of lianhuanhua, her talk also speaks to broader issues of cultural expression and social transformation in the post-growth era.\nJiu Song will present in Session 2: Social Consciousness in Representation on 27 September 2025. Her talk is entitled “Prosthetic Nostalgia and Identity in Chinese Comics: Generation Z’s Fan Reappropriation of Lianhuanhua.”\n","date":"20 September 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/activities/2025-09-26-jiukyoto/","section":"Activities","summary":" On September 26-28, 2025, ChinaComx Phd Candidate Jiu Song will attend the 18th Next-Generation Global Workshop at Kyoto University, Japan. The workshop is organized by the Kyoto University Asian Studies Unit (KUASU) under the theme “Visual Media in a Post-Growth Era.”\nWhile her earlier presentations on younger generations focused mainly on questions of memory and intergenerational transmission, this time her research places greater emphasis on the ways in which visual media themselves shape and articulate identity. By addressing how visual forms and digital platforms mediate the reappropriation of lianhuanhua, her talk also speaks to broader issues of cultural expression and social transformation in the post-growth era.\n","title":"Jiu Song to Present at the 18th Next-Generation Global Workshop at Kyoto University","type":"article"},{"content":" On September 15, 2025, at 18:00, ChinaComx Phd Candidate Jiu Song will deliver a speech titled “Beyond Frames of Painting: Research Pathways into Lianhuanhua and Visual Narratives from a Global Perspective” (超越画格——全球视野下连环画与视觉叙事的研究路径) at the China Academy of Art, Nanshan Campus, South Garden Conference Room. The lecture will be hosted by Prof. Sheng Tianye, Dean of the School of Chinese Painting, China Academy of Art.\nFor the WeChat post in Chinese, see here, and the speech abstracts (in English and Chinese) are as follows:\nLianhuanhua, once one of the most influential forms of mass visual culture in China, has gradually entered the research horizon of the international academic community. This speech takes lianhuanhua as the entry point to introduce the main topics and theoretical frameworks currently emphasized by scholars worldwide. From cultural memory and mediatized nostalgia to fan culture and cross-national comparison, lianhuanhua is not only an object of historical study but also an important window for understanding contemporary visual narratives and cultural communication. The lecture will also draw on several international scholarly works to discuss how researchers use interdisciplinary methods, such as archival study, fieldwork, interviews, and digital ethnography, to approach and interpret lianhuanhua. The speaker shares her own research ideas and methods, demonstrating how lianhuanhua studies connect with broader visual cultural issues. The aim is to use this unique medium to explore, together with students and colleagues, the multiple possibilities of contemporary visual culture research and its place in the global academic context.\n连环画曾经是中国最具影响力的大众视觉文化形式之一，它也逐渐进入国际学界的研究视野。本次讲座将以连环画为切入点，介绍当前全球学者在该领域关注的主要议题与理论框架。从文化记忆、媒介化怀旧，到粉丝文化与跨国比较，连环画不仅是历史研究的对象，也成为理解当代视觉叙事与文化传播的重要窗口。讲座还将结合若干国际学术著作，讨论学者们如何通过跨学科方法——包括档案研究、田野调查、访谈与数字民族志——来认识和阐释连环画。主讲人也将分享自身研究的思路与方法，展示连环画研究如何与更广泛的视觉文化议题发生关联。讲座的目标是通过连环画这一独特媒介，与师生共同探讨当下视觉文化研究的多种可能性，以及它在全球学术语境中的位置。\n","date":"13 September 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/activities/2025-09-13-jiuhangzhou/","section":"Activities","summary":" On September 15, 2025, at 18:00, ChinaComx Phd Candidate Jiu Song will deliver a speech titled “Beyond Frames of Painting: Research Pathways into Lianhuanhua and Visual Narratives from a Global Perspective” (超越画格——全球视野下连环画与视觉叙事的研究路径) at the China Academy of Art, Nanshan Campus, South Garden Conference Room. The lecture will be hosted by Prof. Sheng Tianye, Dean of the School of Chinese Painting, China Academy of Art.\nFor the WeChat post in Chinese, see here, and the speech abstracts (in English and Chinese) are as follows:\n","title":"Jiu Song to Deliver a Speech at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou","type":"article"},{"content":" A strong representation of our project is headed this week to Leicester, UK, for the 2025 Annual Conference of the British Association for Chinese Studies (BACS) \u0026ndash; to be held on 3-5 September at the University of Leicester.\nChinaComx Postdoc Damian Mandzunowski and Nick Stember jointly co-organize and present papers at a two-parted panel tackling all things lianhuanhua: Panel 1, \u0026ldquo;The Politics of an Aesthetics of Medium: Intersections of History and Society in Chinese Comics\u0026rdquo;, investigates how history and politics crossed roads with lianhuanhua; Panel 2, \u0026ldquo;The Aesthetics of a Political Medium: Intersections of Visual Culture and Literature in Chinese Comics\u0026rdquo;, asks how this politicized medium retained its characteristics and uses.\nChinaComx PhD Candidate Jiu Song presents in Panel 1; Astrid Y. Xiao and Aijia Zhang are on Panel 2. In addition, the two back-to-back panels will feature contributions by Dr Chihho Lin, Dr Mariia Guleva, and Norbert Danysz; Dr Annabella Mei Massey (The Courtauld Institute of Art) and Dr Elizabeth Emrich-Rougé (University of Cambridge) will respectively act as Chair/Discussant for the two panels.\nBoth panels will take place on Thursday, 4 September 2025, in Room SBB 1.02: Panel 1 at 13:00-14:30 (Session E) and Panel 2 at 14:45-16:15 (Session F).\nDo come by and say hi!\nFor the full conference program, click here, or read on for the two panel abstracts below:\nPanel 1: The Politics of an Aesthetics of Medium: Intersections of History and Society in Chinese Comics: After the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, lianhuanhua—Chinese comics or “picture stories”—mirrored the evolving landscapes of politics and law, satire and art, and of culture and society. As affective media that mobilized the masses, comics became powerful tools for political communication and the promotion of new socialist values. Simultaneously, these visual- textual narratives offered both subtle critiques and direct challenges to social-political norms. This panel will explore the multifaceted nature of lianhuanhua through novel sources ranging from archives to cartoonists’ collections. Chihho Lin examines Wang Shuhui, a prominent female lianhuanhua artist in the early PRC, demonstrating how her romantic narratives promoted the New Marriage Law of 1951 and served as unique expressions of propaganda, contrasting with epic comics of male artists. Jiu Song investigates the spatial dimension of fans\u0026rsquo; collective memory of Chinese comics, focusing on two most popular lianhuanhua markets and reading zones of 1960s Shanghai. Mariia Guleva explores the devices used to dehumanize and re-humanize antagonists in Fang Cheng’s comic strips of the late 1950s. Damian Mandzunowski compares three different types of Chinese comics from 1951, 1981, and 2011, all linked to communist party anniversaries, to analyze changes and continuities in how history was visualized. Together, these papers aim to deepen our understanding of the relationship between comics and the PRC over six decades of change and continuity, exploring the historical significance, ideological dimensions, and enduring relevance of lianhuanhua.\nPanel 2: The Aesthetics of a Political Medium: Intersections of Visual Culture and Literature in Chinese Comics: This panel investigates how the aesthetic qualities of lianhuanhua shape and are shaped by their content and context. By focusing on the artistic dimensions— stylistic choices, narrative techniques, visual symbolism, and text-image relationships—we will uncover how aesthetics serves not merely as a vessel for political messages but as an active force in shaping political perceptions and social consciousness: How do the artistic conventions of lianhuanhua influence their interpretation? In what ways do visual storytelling and graphic design elements contribute to or undermine official narratives? How did (alleged) historical watersheds impact on aesthetic conventions and their political and social implications? Addressing these questions, this panel proposes a chronological exploration of the aesthetics of lianhuanhua during the 20th century. First, Norbert Danysz takes Chen Guangyi’s works from before and after 1949 as examples of the shifting aesthetics that were introduced into lianhuanhua by the CCP and its propagandistic views on comics. Next, Astrid Xiao focuses on children’s lianhuanhua produced during the Cultural Revolution period, discussing how the CCP set exemplary figures visually in these comics to influence young readers’ perceptions. Nick Stember reveals visual quotes from early-1960s cartoons in a popular late-1970s science fiction comic, highlighting how nostalgia, politics, and satire coexist in lianhuanhua following the Mao era. Aijia Zhang uses computational approaches to explore the general depiction of females in lianhuanhua with a 20th-century setting represented by their voices and images. The panel’s four presentations thus offer deeper insights into the power of visual media in shaping ideologies and cultural narratives within China’s complex socio-political landscape.\n","date":"31 August 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/activities/2025-08-31-bacs2025/","section":"Activities","summary":" A strong representation of our project is headed this week to Leicester, UK, for the 2025 Annual Conference of the British Association for Chinese Studies (BACS) – to be held on 3-5 September at the University of Leicester.\nChinaComx Postdoc Damian Mandzunowski and Nick Stember jointly co-organize and present papers at a two-parted panel tackling all things lianhuanhua: Panel 1, “The Politics of an Aesthetics of Medium: Intersections of History and Society in Chinese Comics”, investigates how history and politics crossed roads with lianhuanhua; Panel 2, “The Aesthetics of a Political Medium: Intersections of Visual Culture and Literature in Chinese Comics”, asks how this politicized medium retained its characteristics and uses.\n","title":"ChinaComx at the British Association for Chinese Studies Annual Conference 2025 in Leicester, UK","type":"article"},{"content":" A review article by ChinaComx Postdoc Damian Mandzunowski of Daisy Yan Du\u0026rsquo;s Animated Encounters: Transnational Movements of Chinese Animation, 1940s-1970s (University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2019) has been published on the Animation Studies 2.0 blog, read it here.\n","date":"20 August 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/activities/2025-08-20-damiananimationreview/","section":"Activities","summary":" A review article by ChinaComx Postdoc Damian Mandzunowski of Daisy Yan Du’s Animated Encounters: Transnational Movements of Chinese Animation, 1940s-1970s (University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2019) has been published on the Animation Studies 2.0 blog, read it here.\n","title":"PUBLICATION ALERT: Mandzunowski reviews Du, Animated Encounters (University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2019)","type":"article"},{"content":" The most recent yearbook of the German Association of Chinese Studies (Deutsche Vereinigung für Chinastudien, DVCS), edited by ChinaComx PI, Lena Henningsen, Daniel Leese, and ChinaComx Postdoc, Damian Mandzunowski, has just been published. It is the outcome of the 2021 annual DVCS conference that we jointly organized in Freiburg.\nSee the publisher\u0026rsquo;s website for all the details, or click here to download the table of contents in PDF.\n","date":"30 July 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/activities/2025-07-30-dvcs18/","section":"Activities","summary":" The most recent yearbook of the German Association of Chinese Studies (Deutsche Vereinigung für Chinastudien, DVCS), edited by ChinaComx PI, Lena Henningsen, Daniel Leese, and ChinaComx Postdoc, Damian Mandzunowski, has just been published. It is the outcome of the 2021 annual DVCS conference that we jointly organized in Freiburg.\nSee the publisher’s website for all the details, or click here to download the table of contents in PDF.\n","title":"PUBLICATION ALERT: Yearbook of the German Assoc. of Chinese Studies (DVCS) 18, ed. by Henningsen, Leese, and Mandzunowski","type":"article"},{"content":" We are cordially inviting you to join a graduate workshop titled Caricature and Comics in a Global Context: Brazil, Turkey, Iran, Algeria, China, and Taiwan to be held on 22 July 2025 between 8:45 and 18:30 at the Seminarraum Werkstatt in Albert-Ueberle-Weg 3-5.\nWe especially invite scholars and students to the keynote lecture, delivered by ChinaComx Visiting Scholar Ivan Gomes (Federal University of Goiás) at 14:00, see below for poster and abstract.\nFor the full conference program, click here.\nKeynote lecture by Ivan Gomes on 22 July at 14:00 # In Search of Brazilian Culture through Post-Mao China: Notes on an Illustrated Report by the Brazilian Cartoonist Henfil (1977-1980)\nIn 1977, Brazilian cartoonist Henfil undertook a two-week visit to China, an experience he documented in a series of newspaper articles that were subsequently compiled into a book. Henfil na China (antes da Coca-Cola) constitutes not only a rare moment of an active engagement between the Brazilian and Chinese comics traditions but is also part of a broader historical context marked by Latin American intellectual and artistic engagements with China. Additionally, the work reflects the transnational ambitions of a number of Brazilian cartoonists who, during the military dictatorship (1964–1985), sought to establish international networks as a means of cultural and political resistance. This presentation offers a preliminary investigation into these themes, drawing on concepts such as transnationalism in comics and world literature to situate Henfil’s production within the Brazilian comics culture of the 1970s - a field shaped by efforts to navigate a print market constrained by censorship and authoritarian control. I argue that Henfil na China embodies a condition of transit by challenging conventional categorizations, as it brings together cartoons, illustrations, photographs, and travel writing within a single hybrid format.\nThe workshop is co-organized by ChinaComx PI, Lena Henningsen, and Anna Kollatz, the co-PI of the research project \u0026ldquo;Wo ist der Witz? Karikaturen als Kommunikationssphäre im spät- und postosmanischen Kontext\u0026rdquo;.\n","date":"7 July 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/activities/2025-07-07-julygraduateworkshop/","section":"Activities","summary":" We are cordially inviting you to join a graduate workshop titled Caricature and Comics in a Global Context: Brazil, Turkey, Iran, Algeria, China, and Taiwan to be held on 22 July 2025 between 8:45 and 18:30 at the Seminarraum Werkstatt in Albert-Ueberle-Weg 3-5.\nWe especially invite scholars and students to the keynote lecture, delivered by ChinaComx Visiting Scholar Ivan Gomes (Federal University of Goiás) at 14:00, see below for poster and abstract.\n","title":"Graduate Workshop 'Caricature and Comics in a Global Context' on 22 July in Heidelberg","type":"article"},{"content":" ChinaComx PI, Lena Henningsen, and postdoc researcher, Damian Mandzunowski, are about to participate in an international symposium on transformations of cultural life in the PRC titled Competing for the people’s eyes and ears from Mao to Xi: transformations of cultural life in the PRC to be held at Department of Sinology, Faculty of Arts, Charles University and Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation International Sinological Centre at Charles University on June 27–28, 2025.\nIn their respective papers, both Lena and Damian will discuss the silences, sounds, and noises of lianhuanhua—albeit in very different ways and to very differing conclusions.\nFor the conference program, see here, and read on for the two paper abstracts below:\nLena Henningsen (Heidelberg University), “Sounds of Silence: Sonic Comic Stories amid the Noises of Maoist China”\nWestern comic art has been described as audiovisual. The depiction of noise such as music emanating from a gramophone or of stomping feet, as Eike Exner argues, proved formative for the rise of modern comics in the US. If audiovisual elements are constitutive for the medium of comics, an inquiry into the sonic qualities of lianhuanhua – the pocket size comics genre popular throughout the 20th century – suggests itself; even more so when the context of their consumption, a China immersed in the rumpus of the revolution, is also taken into the account. Throughout the Mao era, lianhuanhua were employed to mobilize readers for the revolution and to instill them with revolutionary fervor, making full use of the text and images in these comics. Often, lianhuanhua told stories of revolutionary heroes and of ferocious fights against the enemies of the revolution. However, I argue that lianhuanhua are much less noisy than their foreign counterparts: speech bubbles exist, but to a lesser extent than in Western comics; sound is not visualized on the panels; pastoral backgrounds to the action often give scenes a notion of peace and quiet; very often, protagonists are depicted solitarily and absorbed in thought, or within small groups and in calm dialogue; even scenes depicting larger groups of people typically do not shout at their readers. Adding to these stylistic inquiries and their changes over time, I will also inquire into the contexts within which comics were read, arguing that this (relative) silence offered readers an escape into an atmosphere of serenity and quietness. This, I contend, added to the popularity of the genre in a Maoist China flooded with the noises of propaganda.\nDamian Mandzunowski (Heidelberg University), “Revolutionary Onomatopoeia: Soundscapes in/of Chinese Comics of the Mao Era”\nA significant portion of the sonic and visual stimuli capturing people’s attention in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was intermedial. Films often included subtitles indicating how to sing along; radio broadcasts of important editorials encouraged listeners to read along; propaganda posters depicted scenes to be staged and re-enacted. This paper examines another such phenomenon: the depiction of onomatopoeia, interjections, and other expressions of sound in Chinese comics (lianhuanhua) of the Mao era (1949–1976). These popular booklets, enjoyed by millions of children and adults alike, frequently included scenes of evocation, explosions, screams, singing, radio listening, talking, or whispering, but also of natural sounds such as animals chirping or belling and elements like wind, rivers, and forests. Conversely, lianhuanhua functioned as a very “loud” medium: these supposedly silent booklets were often read aloud at street bookstalls or in mobile libraries by groups of children, or by mothers at bedtime. All this was accompanied by the sounds of flipping pages, gasps at plot twists, and the voices of the readers. How did visualised sound relate to image, text, meaning, and reception of lianhuanhua? What changes and continuities in these depictions can be traced over the decades? And which sounds made it into the visual canon of revolutionary onomatopoeia—and which not? This paper offers a first exploration of the intermediality of sound and image in lianhuanhua. By taking a set of exemplary comics as a case study, it explores how popular culture under state socialism drew upon familiar forms while creating indigenous approaches to visualizing soundscapes. It also seeks to enhance our understanding of one of the most influential media in the daily lives of people under state socialism. Expanding beyond the printed form, this paper further highlights lianhuanhua’s cultural significance during a transformative era of modern Chinese history when sound and image converged.\n","date":"15 June 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/activities/2025-06-15-lenadamianprague/","section":"Activities","summary":" ChinaComx PI, Lena Henningsen, and postdoc researcher, Damian Mandzunowski, are about to participate in an international symposium on transformations of cultural life in the PRC titled Competing for the people’s eyes and ears from Mao to Xi: transformations of cultural life in the PRC to be held at Department of Sinology, Faculty of Arts, Charles University and Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation International Sinological Centre at Charles University on June 27–28, 2025.\n","title":"Lena Henningsen and Damian Mandzunowski to Present at the 'Competing for the People’s Eyes and Ears from Mao to Xi' Symposium, 27-28 June in Prague","type":"article"},{"content":" The recent edition of Closure. Kieler Journal für Comicforschung—a leading German comics studies journal—includes a new article by Lena Henningsen, ChinaComx PI, on the rich imagery of the death of Lu Xun within Chinese lianhuanhua comics. Navigating questions of legacy and visual memory, the article offers a glimpse into the larger project of Chinese Lu Xun comics that Lena is advancing within ChinaComx.\nGo to the journal\u0026rsquo;s webiste here to read the article, or directly download a PDF by clicking here.\n","date":"29 May 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/activities/2025-05-29-lenaclosure/","section":"Activities","summary":" The recent edition of Closure. Kieler Journal für Comicforschung—a leading German comics studies journal—includes a new article by Lena Henningsen, ChinaComx PI, on the rich imagery of the death of Lu Xun within Chinese lianhuanhua comics. Navigating questions of legacy and visual memory, the article offers a glimpse into the larger project of Chinese Lu Xun comics that Lena is advancing within ChinaComx.\n","title":"PUBLICATION ALERT: Lena Henningsen's article on the Lianhuanhua Death(s) of Lu Xun in Closure","type":"article"},{"content":" After a bit over a year since the ChinaComx project commenced, and just over half a year after the team was assembled and our daily work on all things lianhuanhua began, we welcomed to Heidelberg 18 scholars of Chinese (and Asian) cartoon, caricature, comics, lianhuanhua, and other related forms of pictorial narratives for an intensively productive albeit fun workshop on 24-26 April 2025.\nOne of the presenters and close friend of the project, Nick Stember, himself a translator and historian of Chinese literature and popular culture who has been writing extensively on the topic of Chinese comics and visual print and screen cultures more broadly for over a decade now, contributed a post-workshop summary. We thank Nick for his initiative and provide the summary here in full length, as, while written from the point of view of one of the participants and voicing some personal reflections from the author, it gives back adequately the scope and variety of presentations and conversations heard during the ChinaComx \u0026ldquo;Lianhuanhua as Method\u0026rdquo; workshop.\nIf we were to select the one key observation of the workshop it perhaps would be that to position a distinct medium as the defining element of inquiry indeed does not imply a limitation or constraint; much to the contrary, and as we believe is also tangible from the following conference report, by putting lianhuanhua centerstage we open up a whole new horizon of possibilities to reading Chinese culture, politics, society, literature, and history.\nAnd now on to Nick Stember\u0026rsquo;s summary of the workshop——and if you would like to continue the discussion, please do reach out to us using the website\u0026rsquo;s contact form!\nLianhuanhua as Method: A ChinaComx Workshop, 24-26 April 20025, Heidelberg # conference report by Nick Stember* # Having spent a very productive three days getting to geek out over lianhuanhua (and Chinese comics more broadly) at the ChinaComx \u0026ldquo;Lianhuanhua as Method\u0026rdquo; workshop, I wanted to take a moment to provide a quick summary of the papers that were presented and touch on some of the recurring topics and themes. This seems particularly appropriate given that, as a relatively small and still emerging field, there is still a great deal of work to be done to define the parameters of our research—which, as it happens was one of the goals of the workshop, which included papers on topics related to lianhuanhua such as (to give just two examples) manhua and cigarette cards. It is my hope also, that by sharing resources, strategies, and findings with our colleagues around the world who are making their own contributions to the study of this distinct area of cultural production, we can play a small part in ‘paying forward’ the generosity of early pioneers in the field, chief among them Kuiyi Shen, Julia Andrews, John Crespi, Ellen Johnston Laing, John Lent, Xu Ying, and Paul Bevan.\nIt was especially appropriate, therefore, that the workshop opened with a keynote from just such a generous pioneer, with Barbara Mittler presenting a paper titled ‘Chained Pictures and Chained by Pictures,’ subtitled ‘Comics and Cultural Revolutions in China.’ As the talk began, in nod to the organizers, Mittler corrected the latter to read ‘Lianhuanhua and Cultural Revolutions in China,’ bringing to the fore one of the questions of definitions and terminology, which would become one of the recurring themes of the workshop. Building on Walter Benjamin’s provocative claim that “only dialectical images are genuinely historical,” Mittler drew on the example of Zhao Hongben’s celebrated lianhuanhua adaptation of ‘Sun Wukong Thrice Defeats the White Bone Demon’ to show how the changes which were made to editions published before and after the Cultural Revolution reflect the aesthetic hegemony of the ‘Three Represents’ as part of the evolving ideology of Maoist orthodoxy.\nThis provocative presentation set the stage for the first panel the following day, beginning with my paper, titled ‘Picture Stories: Delimiting the Generic Boundaries of Taste in Lianhuanhua in the 1950s PRC.’ In it, I drew on an editorial published in the inaugural issue of Picture Stories (Lianhuanhua bao) to highlight some of the tensions over poor taste and violent, pornographic, and superstitious subject matter that carried over from the Republican era, and which would remain at the heart of the medium all the way up into the 1980s, a period which (as it happens) was the subject of my PhD thesis. This historical contextualization of lianhuanhua was paired with Lena Henningsen’s theoretically nuanced discussion of ‘Approaching Lianhuanhua as Genre,’ in which she suggested that lianhuanhua can be understood as not just a medium, but further as genre (or grouping of genres), both contained within the larger super-category of comics (as we understand them today), and at the same time distinct from it.\nIn the question and answer session, meanwhile, Stephen Packard as discussant pointed to the question of affordances and limitations, inviting us to consider, “What questions does [treating lianhuanhua as a medium or genre] allow us to ask?”\nIt was this question that Avital Avina took up in the presentation of her paper, titled ‘Cigarette Cards Telling Stories: Tradeable Lianhuanhua?’ Taking a closer look at an even more neglected area of cultural production, Avina considered the humble cigarette card, which, as she demonstrated, served as much more than just an eye-catching collectible and marketing tool. Rather, Avina argued that the cigarette card encouraged a specific habitus of engagement in graphic narrative that was strikingly similar to the consumption and production of lianhuanhua — highlighting the same mix of high culture and low humor that characterize the comics of the pre- and post-Mao eras. Following on from this, Damian Mandzunowski turned to the weird and wild world of instruction manual lianhuanhua, presenting a series of comics dedicated to the purchasing and maintenance of desirable home appliances, from television sets to refrigerators to bicycles. Observing that these products would have been out of reach for all but the most privileged and well-off of consumers, Mandzunowski made a provocative case for a parallel with the presentation of utopian plentitude that characterized the Great Leap Forward over twenty years earlier, and suggested that these texts can be read as‘manuals of instruction’ in the new cosmopolitanism and capitalist consumerism of the postsocialist period.\nIn his discussion of this panel, chair Harlan Chambers touched on the production of leisure as a central concern of not only the two papers, but the topic of lianhuanhua as a whole, while at the same time cautioning us to not confuse historical repetition with historical continuity. In this regard, he pointed to the re-enclosure of women in the home as a place of abundance as a reversion, rather than a continuation of the radical Maoist politics of emancipation.\nIn the afternoon, the discussion of continuity and discontinuity continued with Martina Caschera’s paper ‘Transmedial Storytelling: Mu Ming’s 假⼿于⼈ Becoming an Italian Graphic Novel’ in which she introduced a recent adaption of a short story by the Chinese science fiction author Mu Ming into a graphic novel by the Italian writer Erica Benvenuti and illustrator Cristina Tomasini, as part of the Future Editions series edited by Francesco Verso. Caschera argued that this work represents an excellent example of the productive collaborations that can develop when graphic storytellers working in one tradition are invited to collaborate with Chinese authors to visually represent speculative futures. Similarly, in her paper ‘Translating Lianhuanhua: Reflections on The Later Journey to the West for Translation Practices in Course,’ Yun-jou Chen shared her experience working with a group of German- and Chinese-speaking students to translate a lianhuanhua adaption of Later Journey to the West from the late 1980s. Chen suggested what made this class particularly effective as a learning exercise was the process of negotiation and advising that took place between students with differing linguistic and cultural backgrounds, resulting in two distinct translations.\nAs discussant, Lena Henningsen noted the unexpected challenges and opportunities that cross-cultural communication provides, particularly in regard to the interpretation of visual motifs and differing approaches to translation, as demonstrated in these two papers. She further shared that ChinaComx has several translations of lianhuanhua forthcoming on its website and encouraged Chen and her students (and indeed participants in the workshop as well) to submit their work for inclusion in this project.\nMariia Guleva kicked off the next panel with her paper ‘When Cartoons Look Like Comics: Interpreting Standalone Manhua in Multi-panel Layouts,’ sharing examples of not only multi-panel manhua (cartoons) – in other words, comics strips – but also full-page spreads on related topics, designed to help readers make sense of otherwise ambiguous content. Drawing on Scott McCloud’s concept of closure, Neil Cohn’s ‘filling in the gaps,’ and Ernst Gombrich’s ‘projection into,’ Guleva observed that such juxtapositions often run the risk of confusing eulogies and criticism, providing examples of letters from readers complaining of just this. In the next paper, ‘Actions and Intentions: A Distant Reading of Lianhuanhua,’ Aijia Zhang took a different tack, providing a statistical analysis of an initial corpus of over 200 lianhuanhua using machine learning applied to the captions and other paratexts. In her preliminary findings, Zhang noted the prevalence of stories set in the War of Resistance Against Japan (1937–1945), highlighting the importance of patriotism and national sovereignty in these stories.\nAs discussant, Jaqueline Berndt urged us to reconsider the usefulness of ambiguity for political messaging and also encouraged the pairing of quantitative and qualitative analysis, observing that digital tools can obscure as much as they reveal.\nFor the second keynote, Stephan Packard presented his paper titled ‘Who Are These Panels For? Comparative Perspectives on Popular Sequential Art,’ providing a whirlwind tour of the contributions of media studies to the emerging field of comics studies over the past two decades. Beginning with the question ‘What does it mean to say that lianhuanhua are an object for comics studies?’ Packard introduced Dick Higgins’ concept of ‘intermedia,’ or the space that is opened up in works that bridge distinct media and genres. Provisionally then, Packard suggested that ‘popular sequential art’ could be used to refer to a loose network of associated terms and creative practices, from comics and lianhuanhua to manhua and cartoons. This multimodal approach to the medium allowed Packard to discuss potential parallels between two distinct (but not necessarily divergent) traditions of popular sequential art. Framing his analysis in two-parts, Packard discussed first the aesthetic and semiotic characteristics of comics, highlighting the formal characteristics that have been used in attempts at definition: among them, cartoonization and caricature, sequence and anatomy of the page, and the juxtaposition of script and image. In the second part, meanwhile, Packard turned to the question of popularity and comics as a tool for mass communication — a topic with particular relevance in the Chinese context of revolutionary socialism — before concluding with a discussion of the division of labor in comics-making, and the persistent association of popular sequential art with Rancière’s ‘representative regime’ in contrast with the ‘aesthetic regime’ of high art.\nIn the lively discussion that followed, participants raised a number of points with Packard, but perhaps most of all acknowledging that lianhuanhua, while sharing many points of similarity with comics as they are understood in the field of comics studies (being primarily composed of American and European comics strips and comic books, with a small carve out for Japanese manga) also remain distinct from this area of cultural production. A key example was the case of the so-called ‘Comics Code’, implemented in the 1950s to head off the threat of censorship from Congress. While lianhuanhua experienced a similar moral panic in the early 1950s following the victory of the Chinese Communist Party in the Civil War (1945–49), the extent to which the government was able to dramatically intervene in the production and consumption of lianhuanhua during this period far exceeded that of their contemporaries in the US. Such examples demonstrate just one of the many areas where not only historically informed but also critically engaged analysis like Packard’s can help contextualize lianhuanhua within the larger field of comics studies.\nAppropriately, then, on the second day of the workshop, Astrid Y. Xiao got things started with her paper ‘Depoliticization, or Not: Role Model, Propaganda, and Lei Feng Comics,’ a close reading of lianhuanhua depicting the model soldier Lei Feng, drawing on examples from the 1960s and up to the present. Xiao argued that while it may be tempting to see such texts as becoming increasingly depoliticized, in fact a closer analysis reveals that, while not being afforded the same cultural significance as before, lianhuanhua featuring Lei Feng remain a potent site of not only political indoctrination, but also moral instruction. Turning to the 1980s, meanwhile, Norbert Danysz presented his paper ‘Appropriations of Sergio Toppi and Stylistic Construction in 1980s Chinese Comics,’ highlighting the curious popularity of an Italian comics artist in China at this time. Providing numerous examples of ‘visual quotes’ from Toppi’s work in lianhuanhua at this time, Danysz argued that not only does the practice resemble the long-standing tradition of ‘swiping’ in comics, but further that elements of Toppi’s style (in particular the copious use of white space in his compositions) can be seen to be prefigured in the work of artists such as Fan Shengfu and Hua Shanchuan from the 1960s.\nIn her discussion of the two papers, Petra Thiel raised the question of models (Toppi on the one hand, Lei Feng on the other) and underlined the importance of taking into account historical specifics, noting parallels between depictions of childhood and national development that tie together the themes explored by the respective presenters.\nIn the final panel for the workshop, Jiu Song presented her paper ‘Yesterday Once More: Reconnections of Lianhuanhua Memory Among Readers in the PRC,’ in which she discussed the initial results of her fieldwork in China, where she has been interviewing readers and fans of the medium, accessing relevant archives, and consulting oral histories produced by publishers. She highlighted the central challenge of this comparative work as finding agreement between individual memory and official narratives and balancing official accounts with grassroots ones. Last but not least, Andreas Seifert provided a lively account of his early research into, and collecting of lianhuanhua, beginning with his first encounters with the medium in the 1990s, and culminating in his PhD dissertation, published in 2008 as the monograph Bildgeschichten für Chinas Massen: Comic und Comicproduktion im 20. Jahrhundert.\nIn her discussion of these two presentations, in addition to noting the symmetry between the two papers (one on readers more broadly, and one from a very particular reader), Emily Graf drew our attention to the fact that although Seifert has since left academia, this early work provides a solid foundation for the field, not least because his collection of over 3,000 lianhuanhua can now be found in the collection of the CATS Library at Heidelberg University, with digital scans being available to researchers around the world.\nThe conference organizers accordingly invited participants to consult a selection of titles from exactly that collection, extending the theoretical discussions of the previous two days to a practical exercise in close reading. This provided a capstone to a workshop that touched on a range of topics and themes, all centered around the topic of lianhuanhua and Chinese comics more broadly. As Mandzunowski and Henningsen noted, the call for ‘lianhuanhua as method’ was meant in part as an academic provocation — a stimulus to challenge us to think more seriously about the ways that these texts can be used not just as illustrations of historical developments and political campaigns, but as objects of study in their own right. As the rich array of papers presented suggests, lianhuanhua represent an important and largely underappreciated area of cultural production, demonstrating both the continuity and discontinuity of China’s ‘long 20th century,’ and the challenges presented to researchers attempting to bring this body of texts into conversation with popular sequential art from other distinct cultural traditions.\nWhile there is a lot more that can be said, I will end my summary here, to simply thank the organizers for a wonderful and stimulating workshop, inaugurating the exciting new ChinaComx project at the Centre for Asian and Transculutural Studies, Institute of Chinese Studies, Heidelberg University.\n*Nick Stember is a media historian and translator of Chinese literature and popular culture. His work focuses on the remediation of the past through historical fiction and graphic narrative, considering the combined impacts of public policy and technology on the material conditions for the production and consumption of art and commercial entertainment. See more of his work at www.nickstember.com\n","date":"15 May 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/activities/2025-05-15-lianhuanhuaasmethodreport/","section":"Activities","summary":" After a bit over a year since the ChinaComx project commenced, and just over half a year after the team was assembled and our daily work on all things lianhuanhua began, we welcomed to Heidelberg 18 scholars of Chinese (and Asian) cartoon, caricature, comics, lianhuanhua, and other related forms of pictorial narratives for an intensively productive albeit fun workshop on 24-26 April 2025.\n","title":"Conference Report by Nick Stember on the ChinaComx Workshop 'Lianhuanhua as Method'!","type":"article"},{"content":" ChinaComx postdoc researcher Damian Mandzunowski is to take part in the conference \u0026ldquo;Sonic Histories of East Asia: Thinking History Through Sound\u0026rdquo; held on 15-16 May 2025 at the Department of Asian and North African Studies at the Ca\u0026rsquo; Foscari University of Venice.\nThe conference, arising from a growing reception of the sonic turn also in Chinese and Asian Studies, explores how sound, voice, noise, radio, and other auditory media and modes can contribute to a field of Sound Studies that remains dominated by theories drawn from Western experience.\nDamian will be presenting a chapter draft from his current book project on political study and other collective reading practices in the PRC. The paper, titled \u0026ldquo;Radio Study and the Sounds of Collective Reading Practices in the People’s Republic of China\u0026rdquo;, focuses, in the first part, on the phenomenon of radio study (guangbo xuexi) of the 1950s-1980s, and, in the second part, on various diegetic and nondiegetic sounds of collective reading activites.\nClick here for the program, and read more about Damian\u0026rsquo;s paper in his abstract:\nCollective reading practices were a defining feature in Chinese state-socialist propaganda efforts after 1949. Occurring via obligatory political study classes for workers, cadres, soldiers, and others, these social rituals involved session leaders conducting and collective readers engaging in guided group study and text discussion. But, to take part in any such collective reading session was inevitably linked to the act of (collective) listening. Leaders often read selected fragments aloud and offered insights through brief lectures, expecting the collective readers to listen attentively to their voice and presented contents. At times, the collective readers heard without listening: the communicated contents passed through the minds of the listeners without retention. Radio broadcasts and other auditory media were also used, especially in rural areas, extending political education and disseminating information and linking the auditory experience of politics with daily life. But these could break or malfunction, distorting the broadcast beyond comprehension. As recent scholarship has deepened our understanding of sound’s political uses (Lei 2019; Li 2020; Tang 2020; Santacaterina 2021; Wang 2022; Lekner 2022, 2024), this paper asks: In what ways did sound and voice work toward (or against) the goals pursued by organized forms of political study in the People’s Republic of China? In what ways did listening to Marx being read aloud differ from silent study of Marx? How did the voice, timbre, and enunciation of reading group leaders impact listeners\u0026rsquo; reception of Lenin? How, then, did the party-state prepare for and evaluate the auditory elements of collective reading? This paper presents a comprehensive study of radio study (guangbo xuexi 广播学习) and similar sound-based study methods, utilizing archival broadcasts, radio magazines, state archives, and memoirs. In examining the auditory ways of collective reading practices, it explores the uses and failures of political communication under state socialism.\n","date":"10 May 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/activities/2025-05-10-damianvenice/","section":"Activities","summary":" ChinaComx postdoc researcher Damian Mandzunowski is to take part in the conference “Sonic Histories of East Asia: Thinking History Through Sound” held on 15-16 May 2025 at the Department of Asian and North African Studies at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice.\nThe conference, arising from a growing reception of the sonic turn also in Chinese and Asian Studies, explores how sound, voice, noise, radio, and other auditory media and modes can contribute to a field of Sound Studies that remains dominated by theories drawn from Western experience.\n","title":"Damian Mandzunowski to Present at the Sonic Histories of East Asia Conference, 15-16 May in Venice","type":"article"},{"content":" To kickstart the second year of our research project, the ChinaComx team cordially invites scholars working in Europe on Chinese comics, cartoons, picture stories, and other visual narratives to participate in the three-day workshop under the theme of \u0026ldquo;Lianhuanhua as Method\u0026rdquo;!\nWorkshop abstract:\nWhat does it mean to position a distinct medium as the defining element of inquiry? How does this change when the medium is also recognized as a specific (literary) genre? And how do approaches to studying history, art, culture, politics, and society shift when said medium / genre takes center stage in research? The medium in question is lianhuanhua, a distinct Chinese form of comics, and with this workshop, hosted by the ERC-ChinaComx project at Heidelberg University, we welcome interdisciplinary contributions examining lianhuanhua from diverse perspectives: whether as a distinct historical phenomenon, a part of global visual narratives, or a case study illuminating broader cultural or political contexts. How do we define lianhuanhua and how do our definitions change across different times and contexts? And what are the implications—direct and indirect—of approaching lianhuanhua as a research method? A central premise is that lianhuanhua serves as lens for (critical) inquiry: placing lianhuanhua at the forefront of analysis thus aims to expand all our various research approaches and fields. By starting with the image-text and then extending the analysis to other texts, events, and media in the larger context of production, dissemination, and consumption of lianhuanhua, the workshop seeks to offer a site for discussing how we understand the intersections of political communication, visual narratives, and meaning production.\nWe are looking forward to hearing two keynote lectures, by Barbara Mittler and by Stephan Packard, as well as to offering a hands-on comics browsing and rummaging session—in addition to featuring over a dozen fascinating paper presentations and the ensuing discussions.\nJoin the workshop on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday 24-26 April 2025 at CATS Heidelberg.\nClick here for the full workshop program in PDF, and send us an email to register for participation. We look forward to welcoming you to Heidelberg soon!\n","date":"10 April 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/activities/2025-04-10-lianhuanhuaasmethod/","section":"Activities","summary":" To kickstart the second year of our research project, the ChinaComx team cordially invites scholars working in Europe on Chinese comics, cartoons, picture stories, and other visual narratives to participate in the three-day workshop under the theme of “Lianhuanhua as Method”!\nWorkshop abstract:\nWhat does it mean to position a distinct medium as the defining element of inquiry? How does this change when the medium is also recognized as a specific (literary) genre? And how do approaches to studying history, art, culture, politics, and society shift when said medium / genre takes center stage in research? The medium in question is lianhuanhua, a distinct Chinese form of comics, and with this workshop, hosted by the ERC-ChinaComx project at Heidelberg University, we welcome interdisciplinary contributions examining lianhuanhua from diverse perspectives: whether as a distinct historical phenomenon, a part of global visual narratives, or a case study illuminating broader cultural or political contexts. How do we define lianhuanhua and how do our definitions change across different times and contexts? And what are the implications—direct and indirect—of approaching lianhuanhua as a research method? A central premise is that lianhuanhua serves as lens for (critical) inquiry: placing lianhuanhua at the forefront of analysis thus aims to expand all our various research approaches and fields. By starting with the image-text and then extending the analysis to other texts, events, and media in the larger context of production, dissemination, and consumption of lianhuanhua, the workshop seeks to offer a site for discussing how we understand the intersections of political communication, visual narratives, and meaning production.\n","title":"ChinaComx Workshop Announcement: Lianhuanhua as Method, Heidelberg 24-26 April 2025","type":"article"},{"content":" ChinaComx Phd Candidate Astrid Y. Xiao will present her research during the 2025 Child and the Book Conference. This year\u0026rsquo;s edition is running under the theme \u0026ldquo;Children Shaping The(ir) World: Between the Exceptional and the Everyday\u0026rdquo; and will be hosted on 23-25 April 2025 at Tilburg University, Netherlands.\nAstrid will present her paper in Session 2 (14:00–15:45) as part of Panel 4: Political Childhoods, chaired by Anna Czernow. Titled “Inventing A Non-typical Young Role Model in Communist China: Everyday Heroism in Comics about Lei Feng (1960s–2020s)”, her talk explores how children’s comics and picturebooks in China has shaped political and moral ideals across generations, through the evolving portrayal of the national icon Lei Feng.\nAstrid\u0026rsquo;s paper abstract:\nConsidering the powerful influence of role models on youth, crafting and promoting role models is (and was) a common strategy for nation-building and educating younger generations in China. These role models are often titled “(Little) Heroes”, with their faces and stories being frequently featured in textbooks, school wall newspapers, and on children’s bookshelves. In 1960s communist China, these celebrated heroes primarily displayed traits of loyalty to Chairman Mao and the Chinese Communist Party, patriotism, and a strong passion for revolution and socialist construction. While heroism is a broad concept that also includes acts of kindness and courage in everyday life—acknowledged today as the “banality of heroism” (Franco and Zimbardo, 2006)—in the 1960s, China predominantly favored the celebration of exceptional heroes in its political and educational narratives. This paper focuses on an exception of the exceptional. Lei Feng, a real-life People’s Liberation Army soldier who died aged 22 in 1962, was known as a moral exemplar for his pure altruism and numerous good deeds. Since the 1960s, Lei Feng’s stories from his childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood have been crafted into various forms of propagandist materials (story collections, posters, comics, etc.) and have been widely received by Chinese children from different generations. By close reading 14 comics and picturebooks about Lei Feng produced between the 1960s and 2020s, I argue that, from the very beginning, these visual texts oscillated between the grand narratives of national construction and a mundane hero who does every small everyday deed well. This oscillation tries to break free from the inappropriateness of conventional exceptional hero narratives in Lei Feng’s case. Ultimately, over more than half a century of oscillation, everyday heroism has clearly triumphed. Whether in terms of characterization or artistic style, 21st-century comics depict Lei Feng as more commonplace and accessible, bringing him closer to his young friends and followers both in the comics and in real life. The victory of everyday heroism in the comics about Lei Feng can not only be seen as a shift in the styles of political propaganda in modern China, but it also demonstrates that, over the past decades, child readers have been rediscovered and reevaluated.\nDownload the full conference program here.\n","date":"5 April 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/activities/2025-04-05-astridtilburg/","section":"Activities","summary":" ChinaComx Phd Candidate Astrid Y. Xiao will present her research during the 2025 Child and the Book Conference. This year’s edition is running under the theme “Children Shaping The(ir) World: Between the Exceptional and the Everyday” and will be hosted on 23-25 April 2025 at Tilburg University, Netherlands.\nAstrid will present her paper in Session 2 (14:00–15:45) as part of Panel 4: Political Childhoods, chaired by Anna Czernow. Titled “Inventing A Non-typical Young Role Model in Communist China: Everyday Heroism in Comics about Lei Feng (1960s–2020s)”, her talk explores how children’s comics and picturebooks in China has shaped political and moral ideals across generations, through the evolving portrayal of the national icon Lei Feng.\n","title":"Astrid Y. Xiao to Present at The Child and the Book Conference 2025 in Tilburg","type":"article"},{"content":" Our PI, Lena Henningsen, will take part in a roundtable session during this years\u0026rsquo; AAS annual conference in Columbus, Ohio.\nTitled \u0026ldquo;On Copying: An Interdisciplinary Conversation\u0026rdquo;, the roundtable brings together Eugenia Lean, Columbia University; Winnie Wong, University of California, Berkeley; Lena Henningsen, Heidelberg University; Kaijun Chen, Brown University; and Yuan Yi, Concordia University; and is to be chaired by Jacob Eyferth, University of Chicago.\nJoin the conversation on Friday, March 14, during the 9:00 AM–10:30 AM session at Hyatt, Fayette, 2nd Floor (Panel 2-018)!\nAbstract:\nThe practice of copying, broadly defined, has drawn scholarly interests from an array of disciplines in the China field as China emerges as a powerful economy while at the same time achieving notoriety as the “quintessential copycat.” Instead of holding onto its conventional definition, mostly informed by the contemporary IPR regime, recent scholars have problematized the notion of copying itself by historicizing its varying practices in different fields. STS scholars recast copying (or tinkering or prototyping) as a serious technological endeavor with emphasis on its experimental nature; art historians redefine imitation as transformative artistic work; and literary scholars approach hand-copying as a way of rewriting where the boundary between authors and readers remains fluid. Some historians, on the other hand, challenge the assumption about the lenient attitude toward copying in Chinese culture while others question the entrenched link between China and copying by demonstrating that it was not a uniquely Chinese practice. All these studies call for a more nuanced approach to the history of copying in China and beyond with attention to its temporal changes in different social and cultural contexts. This roundtable session presents discussants who have addressed these issues in their respective fields, providing an interdisciplinary forum to discuss this highly contested (and often politically charged) subject.\nClick here for the conference program in PDF, or head over to the conference\u0026rsquo;s website for more information.\n","date":"10 March 2025","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/activities/2025-03-10-lenaaasroundtable/","section":"Activities","summary":" Our PI, Lena Henningsen, will take part in a roundtable session during this years’ AAS annual conference in Columbus, Ohio.\nTitled “On Copying: An Interdisciplinary Conversation”, the roundtable brings together Eugenia Lean, Columbia University; Winnie Wong, University of California, Berkeley; Lena Henningsen, Heidelberg University; Kaijun Chen, Brown University; and Yuan Yi, Concordia University; and is to be chaired by Jacob Eyferth, University of Chicago.\nJoin the conversation on Friday, March 14, during the 9:00 AM–10:30 AM session at Hyatt, Fayette, 2nd Floor (Panel 2-018)!\n","title":"Lena Henningsen to Take Part in Roundtable Discussion on the Art of Copying at AAS 2025","type":"article"},{"content":" On 15 October 2024 the CATS Library would like to cordially invite you to the finissage of our exhibition \u0026ldquo;Comics from China: Entertainment – Realities – Propaganda?\u0026rdquo;!\nThe finissage offers a last opportunity to view the exhibition, after which Lena Henningsen and Damian Mandzunowski from the ERC project \u0026ldquo;ChinaComx\u0026rdquo;, newly established at CATS, will give a keynote speech on the roles of heroes and villains in comics of the Mao era.\nIn addition, three wonderful animated short films by young Chinese artists will round off the programme. Of course, a small buffet will also be provided for your physical well-being!\nProgram:\n18:30 Welcome and exhibition tour, Foyer, CATS Library\n19:00 Keynote: \u0026ldquo;Into the Maoverse: Heroes and Villains in Chinese Comics,\u0026rdquo; Lena Henningsen \u0026amp; Damian Mandzunowski (ERC-ChinaComx), CATS Auditorium (R.010.01.05)\n19:45 Film screening: Animated shorts from the Nanjing University of the Arts 南京艺术学院:\n当我再次走进厨房 (Now I\u0026rsquo;m in the Kitchen), dir.: Yana Pan 潘亭钰, 2022 每天朝山顶推一秒的石头 (Being Sisyphus for One Second a Day), dir.: Peixuan Cheng 成佩轩, 2021 雾上清晨 (Beyond the Fog), dir.: Xue Feng 薛峰, 2021 End of the event around 20:30.\nCreating the exhibition was part of a seminar of the Institute of East Asian Art History; for the names of the participating students please refer to the exhibition\u0026rsquo;s webpage.\n","date":"10 October 2024","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/activities/2024-10-10-finissagehd/","section":"Activities","summary":" On 15 October 2024 the CATS Library would like to cordially invite you to the finissage of our exhibition “Comics from China: Entertainment – Realities – Propaganda?”!\nThe finissage offers a last opportunity to view the exhibition, after which Lena Henningsen and Damian Mandzunowski from the ERC project “ChinaComx”, newly established at CATS, will give a keynote speech on the roles of heroes and villains in comics of the Mao era.\n","title":"Closing Event of a Lianhuanha Exhibition at the CATS Library with ChinaComx","type":"article"},{"content":" On 9 October 2024 at 11:00 - 12:30, ChinaComx PI Lena Henningsen will deliver a talk titled \u0026ldquo;Of Eyebrows, Moustaches and Revolutionary Spirit\u0026rdquo; as part of the Sociology Seminar Lecture Series at the School of Social and Political Science, The University of Edinburgh. The talk will be held at the Violet Laidlaw Room, Chrystal Macmillan Building and online.\nTo register for the hybrid in-person and online talk, please book your space via Eventbrite.\nAbstract:\nLu Xun is seen as the founding father of modern Chinese literature; thanks to the propagandistic efforts of the Chinese Communist Party, he was posthumously framed as a revolutionary fighter wielding his pen for the sake of the nation, and the revolution. This (re-)framing rested on political speeches appropriating the famous intellectual, on depictions of the author on propaganda posters, as well as on adaptations of his person and his works into Chinese comics (lianhuanhua连环画). In my presentation, I will sketch this process and argue that comics, as a medium combining text and image, were particularly well suited to this end, quite literally framing Lu Xun and his works from different viewpoints. As adaptations, lianhuanhua represent distinct readings of famous literary works – and as a genre of “pulp fiction”, they reached massive audiences, thus impacting how large parts of the Chinese population would read Lu Xun. I will show how lianhuanhua had their part in the styling of Lu Xun into a devoted revolutionary. Yet, time and again, lianhuanhua moved beyond the narrow reading of the CCP’s Luxunology, thus demonstrating that as a genre it is particularly well-suited to move beyond the narrow frames of official ideology, and that the texts of Lu Xun themselves defy easy readings and appropriations through Party ideology. Core to this are the ambivalences inscribed into the texts of Lu Xun, as well as the depictions of his eyebrows and moustache.\n","date":"27 September 2024","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/activities/2024-09-27-lenaedinburgh/","section":"Activities","summary":" On 9 October 2024 at 11:00 - 12:30, ChinaComx PI Lena Henningsen will deliver a talk titled “Of Eyebrows, Moustaches and Revolutionary Spirit” as part of the Sociology Seminar Lecture Series at the School of Social and Political Science, The University of Edinburgh. The talk will be held at the Violet Laidlaw Room, Chrystal Macmillan Building and online.\nTo register for the hybrid in-person and online talk, please book your space via Eventbrite.\n","title":"Lena Henningsen to Deliver a Talk at Edinburgh on Lu Xun in Lianhuanhua on 9 October","type":"article"},{"content":" As the 399th talk delivered at the NY Comics \u0026amp; Picture-story Symposium, Damian Mandzunowski and Lena Henningsen will introduce Chinese comics and the ChinaComx project on Tuesday, 24 Sept. 2024, at 9 pm Heidelberg time / 3 pm New York time. For more, see here.\nTo register for the online talk via zoom, please email comicssymposium@gmail.com.\nTheir talk is titled Beyond Captain America and Akira: Heroes and Villains in Chinese Comics and Caricature, abstract:\nComics are a global medium with local variations and characteristics, emanating from different historical, cultural, social, political, and economic contexts. Putting the many differences aside, many forms of comics often share high popularity, expressive visuals and a focus on positive and negative role models. In this presentation, we therefore propose to look at Chinese comics (lianhuanhua) and caricature (manhua) through the lens of heroes and villains to offer both a general overview of these visual media and a specific examination of one of its core tropes. We will show how the era of high Maoism of the 1960s-1970s was also a heyday of the lianhuanhua genre as it was widely used as a tool for education and propaganda. Contrary to popular belief, also throughout the early Reform Era of the 1980s, lianhuanhua continued to shape prototypes of ideological heroes and villains, rendering all kinds of role models easy to detect. At the same time, however, Chinese comics began to critically re-examine the Maoist years, adapted (officially and bootleg) Hollywood blockbusters, and to, employ a fuller repertoire of expressive and ambivalent visual techniques, including pencil drawing, oil painting, traditional Chinese papercut and watercolors, or woodcut inspired by European modernism, thus undermining the previously clear-cut notions of what makes a hero (or villain) and they would have to look like. And although lianhuanhua as a particular medium-specific type of Chinese comics mostly faded away toward the end of the century, these handy pocket-sized booklets were shared among children and adults alike to be read at street stall libraries or at work units after hours for over seven decades. With an estimated 50.000 unique titles published since 1949 and one-in-three new books published in 1986 being a lianhuanhua, Chinese comics deserve broader recognition and scholarly interest both as distinct genre and area of academic research.\n","date":"4 September 2024","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/activities/2024-09-04-lenadamiannewyork/","section":"Activities","summary":" As the 399th talk delivered at the NY Comics \u0026 Picture-story Symposium, Damian Mandzunowski and Lena Henningsen will introduce Chinese comics and the ChinaComx project on Tuesday, 24 Sept. 2024, at 9 pm Heidelberg time / 3 pm New York time. For more, see here.\nTo register for the online talk via zoom, please email comicssymposium@gmail.com.\nTheir talk is titled Beyond Captain America and Akira: Heroes and Villains in Chinese Comics and Caricature, abstract:\n","title":"Damian Mandzunowski and Lena Henningsen to Present on ChinaComx at the NY Comics Symposium on 24 September","type":"article"},{"content":" A new research article jointly written by Laura Pozzi and ChinaComx researcher Damian Mandzunowski has been published in the August 2024 issue of positions: asia critique.\nThe article is now also available to read/download via project muse here.\nArticle abstract:\nThis article examines how, in the years following the end of the Cultural Revolution (1966 – 76), Jiang Qing 江青 (1914 – 91) became a negative icon of a liberated woman in high office in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). During the Cultural Revolution, Jiang Qing transformed herself into a model female political leader. After her arrest in 1976, however, political caricatures systematically deconstructed her curated image by transforming her into the antithesis of the ideal powerful woman in a socialist society. Since a model liberated female politician was not yet available, Jiang Qing served as an “iconic anti-icon” of women in politics under state socialism. Acknowledging the importance of Jiang Qing as a historical figure in Maoist China, this article analyzes how post – Cultural Revolution caricatures of her provide us with an understanding of the Chinese Communist Party’s anxieties about women in power, and it raises questions about the absence of an iconic woman-leader in the PRC’s political visual culture despite years of campaigning to achieve women’s liberation.\n","date":"2 August 2024","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/activities/2024-08-02-jiangqing/","section":"Activities","summary":" A new research article jointly written by Laura Pozzi and ChinaComx researcher Damian Mandzunowski has been published in the August 2024 issue of positions: asia critique.\nThe article is now also available to read/download via project muse here.\nArticle abstract:\nThis article examines how, in the years following the end of the Cultural Revolution (1966 – 76), Jiang Qing 江青 (1914 – 91) became a negative icon of a liberated woman in high office in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). During the Cultural Revolution, Jiang Qing transformed herself into a model female political leader. After her arrest in 1976, however, political caricatures systematically deconstructed her curated image by transforming her into the antithesis of the ideal powerful woman in a socialist society. Since a model liberated female politician was not yet available, Jiang Qing served as an “iconic anti-icon” of women in politics under state socialism. Acknowledging the importance of Jiang Qing as a historical figure in Maoist China, this article analyzes how post – Cultural Revolution caricatures of her provide us with an understanding of the Chinese Communist Party’s anxieties about women in power, and it raises questions about the absence of an iconic woman-leader in the PRC’s political visual culture despite years of campaigning to achieve women’s liberation.\n","title":"PUBLICATION ALERT: Article on Caricatures of Jiang Qing co-written by Damian Mandzunowski","type":"article"},{"content":" ChinaComx researchers Aijia Zhang and Damian Mandzunowski will take part in the workshops and conference Charting the European D-SEA: Digital Scholarship in East Asian Studies jointly organied by the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and the Berlin State Library – Prussian Cultural Heritage, to be held on 8-12 July 2024 in Berlin.\nDamian will also present on 12 July a joint paper titled \u0026ldquo;Beyond Manga and Marvel: Digitally Approaching Chinese Comics (Lianhuanhua),\u0026rdquo; which provides overview of the DH scope of ChinaComx \u0026ndash; paper abstract:\nFor many years now digital humanities (DH) scholars have approached graphic narratives such as comics as primary sources for digitally enhanced academic engagements with culture, history, or society. However, extant literature mainly focuses on US-American comic books, Japanese manga, or French/Belgian bandes dessinées. Lianhuanhua, a type of Chinese comics mostly consisting of a single image panel with a few lines of text below, are by and large overlooked—and this despite their untapped potential as novel sources for DH scholarship. Through the ERC-funded research project “Comics Culture in the People’s Republic of China (ChinaComx)” we aim to expand the related fields by introducing lianhuanhua as a new source employing digital tools, programming, and computer vision. While contemporary Chinese webcomics can be downloaded and read on mobile devices, earlier lianhuanhua were produced on low quality paper and in small pocket-size format resulting in a distinct instability of the books. Their materiality is a key characteristic of this medium, defining it both as a distinct type of graphic narrative while also pointing toward shared elements with other comics of different origins. Making use of the digitized CATS-Seifert Collection of Chinese Comics at Heidelberg University consisting of over 3000 unique lianhuanhua, ChinaComx makes extensive use of digitizing the physical records, advanced OCR-ing, and AI-assisted automatized translation of large datasets consisting of the image-text dyads. Furthermore, we also plan to do DH aided visual analyses, using methods such as visual language processing or network analysis, to delve into issues such scene composition, stylometry or genre defining visual features of lianhuanhua. The results of these, collected and made available to the public via an OA digital database, will not only allow non-Chinese speakers to read and engage with lianhuanhua, but they will also present engaging case studies to be picked up and expanded by other DH scholars. ChinaComx will thus also digitally preserve lianhuanhua and make them available for university and school classroom use. In this proposed presentation, we will give an overview of the ChinaComx sources, DH approaches and potential issues related to ethics and longevity of digital scholarship on Chinese comics.\nSee the complete workshops program and abstracts here, and the conference program and abstracts here.\n","date":"19 June 2024","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/activities/2024-06-30-dsea-berlin/","section":"Activities","summary":" ChinaComx researchers Aijia Zhang and Damian Mandzunowski will take part in the workshops and conference Charting the European D-SEA: Digital Scholarship in East Asian Studies jointly organied by the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and the Berlin State Library – Prussian Cultural Heritage, to be held on 8-12 July 2024 in Berlin.\nDamian will also present on 12 July a joint paper titled “Beyond Manga and Marvel: Digitally Approaching Chinese Comics (Lianhuanhua),” which provides overview of the DH scope of ChinaComx – paper abstract:\n","title":"ChinaComx to Present at a Digital Humanities in East Asian Studies Conference in Berlin on 8-12 July","type":"article"},{"content":" ChinaComx PI, Lena Henningsen, will present on the realm of translating Chinese comics at the ShowCase Dolmetschwissenschaft Live at the Institut für Übersetzen und Dolmetschen (Institute for Translation and Interpreting) at Heidelberg University, in the Konferenzsaal II at Plöck 57A, on 3 July.\nThe talk is titled \u0026ldquo;LIANHUANHUA (连环画): CHINESE COMICS IN TRANSLATION AND IN TRANSCULTURAL PERSPECTIVE\u0026rdquo; and will be at 14:15. For direct access to the Zoom stream, click here.\nThe conference will be simultaneously translated into seven languages—English, French, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish—so even if you\u0026rsquo;re not familiar with German, do tune in! Click here for the conference poster and program.\n","date":"19 June 2024","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/activities/2024-06-15-lenaiued/","section":"Activities","summary":" ChinaComx PI, Lena Henningsen, will present on the realm of translating Chinese comics at the ShowCase Dolmetschwissenschaft Live at the Institut für Übersetzen und Dolmetschen (Institute for Translation and Interpreting) at Heidelberg University, in the Konferenzsaal II at Plöck 57A, on 3 July.\nThe talk is titled “LIANHUANHUA (连环画): CHINESE COMICS IN TRANSLATION AND IN TRANSCULTURAL PERSPECTIVE” and will be at 14:15. For direct access to the Zoom stream, click here.\n","title":"Lena Henningsen to Present at the 2024 IÜD Showcase in Heidelberg on 3 July","type":"article"},{"content":" ChinaComx researcher Damian Mandzunowski will present a paper titled Collective Reading Practices After the Cultural Revolution at the conference Political Lives in Socialist China organized by Isabelle Thireau, CNRS/EHESS, CCJ-CECMC and Puck Engman, Center for Chinese Studies at UC Berkeley and held at the EHESS: École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris on 10-12 June 2024. Click here for the program.\nHis paper abstract:\nConventional understanding of post-Cultural Revolution China suggests a gradual but steady shift from politics to production. However, did politics truly vanish, or did one form of the political replace another? This paper takes a case study approach, examining a selection of mid-1970s mass-reading campaigns, to inquire how political study continued to shape the daily lives of workers and cadres. The mass phase of the Cultural Revolution, due to the excesses of group readings of confessions and accusations at struggle sessions, rendered texts relevant to virtually everyone. Once it was over by the early-1970s, it gave way again to more systematically organized practices of collective reading akin to those functioning in the PRC since 1949. While study materials swiftly adapted to current political goals, a system of incentives and penalties ensured regular participation. Detailed descriptions from above further facilitated a tightly controlled guidance. State propaganda hence put much effort in utilizing collective reading practices to convey notions of statehood, class struggle, and mass society. At the same time, collective readers ultimately choose their own participation strategies ranging from enthusiastic activism through careful ignorance to blatant disruption. Examining the intertwined relationship between collective reading practices, the resurgence of the state apparatus, and the intra-party struggles over Mao’s succession illustrates how the lived experience of politics retained its significance also within the context of state socialist promotion of production.\n","date":"30 May 2024","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/activities/2024-05-30-damianparis/","section":"Activities","summary":" ChinaComx researcher Damian Mandzunowski will present a paper titled Collective Reading Practices After the Cultural Revolution at the conference Political Lives in Socialist China organized by Isabelle Thireau, CNRS/EHESS, CCJ-CECMC and Puck Engman, Center for Chinese Studies at UC Berkeley and held at the EHESS: École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris on 10-12 June 2024. Click here for the program.\nHis paper abstract:\n","title":"Damian Mandzunowski Presenting at the Political Lives in Socialist China Conference, 10-12 June in Paris","type":"article"},{"content":" ChinaComx PI, Lena Henningsen, will present a paper at the conference Rethinking Modern Chinese Elites \u0026ndash; From Print to Computational Methods: Sources, Languages, and Interdisciplinarity organized by the Elites, Networks and Power in Modern China project at Aix-Marseiile University on 10-12 June 2024.\nHer paper abstract:\nIt is a truism that Chinese culture is a culture of reading; and – with the exception of the time of high socialism – reading has always been a marker of cultural capital. Yet, how exactly did reading impact on individuals, society and the larger developments and transformations in Chinese history? What did Chinese citizens read when, why, and how? In how far was reading a transformative act for everyone – and what readings were limited to certain groups, to intellectual, literary or political elites? Studying historical reading practices poses a number of methodological problems, not least because it is very often a private, even intimate activity of which little historical documents exist. Extant accounts – often autobiographical sources – are ephemeral, anecdotal, and very often vague. To analyze reading practices during China’s long 1970s quantitatively, we developed the ReadAct database (https://readchina.github.io/readact.html) chronicling concrete historical reading acts as recorded in a broad array of life writing sources. In this paper, I will present findings from the database, taking into account the biases and blind spots in the sources and in the database. Considering that most accounts were written by urban educated youth sent to the countryside and considering what they chose to write about in their accounts (and what to leave out) the database chronicles how much of the social, literary and intellectual change commonly associated with the early years of the reform era had its origins in the reading quests of the rusticated educated youth. Moreover, these reading quests also anticipate how as a group these youths – many of them social and political outcasts at the time – would transform into the literary, cultural and / or intellectual elite of the early reform years.\n","date":"12 May 2024","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/activities/2024-05-12-lenaaix/","section":"Activities","summary":" ChinaComx PI, Lena Henningsen, will present a paper at the conference Rethinking Modern Chinese Elites – From Print to Computational Methods: Sources, Languages, and Interdisciplinarity organized by the Elites, Networks and Power in Modern China project at Aix-Marseiile University on 10-12 June 2024.\nHer paper abstract:\nIt is a truism that Chinese culture is a culture of reading; and – with the exception of the time of high socialism – reading has always been a marker of cultural capital. Yet, how exactly did reading impact on individuals, society and the larger developments and transformations in Chinese history? What did Chinese citizens read when, why, and how? In how far was reading a transformative act for everyone – and what readings were limited to certain groups, to intellectual, literary or political elites? Studying historical reading practices poses a number of methodological problems, not least because it is very often a private, even intimate activity of which little historical documents exist. Extant accounts – often autobiographical sources – are ephemeral, anecdotal, and very often vague. To analyze reading practices during China’s long 1970s quantitatively, we developed the ReadAct database (https://readchina.github.io/readact.html) chronicling concrete historical reading acts as recorded in a broad array of life writing sources. In this paper, I will present findings from the database, taking into account the biases and blind spots in the sources and in the database. Considering that most accounts were written by urban educated youth sent to the countryside and considering what they chose to write about in their accounts (and what to leave out) the database chronicles how much of the social, literary and intellectual change commonly associated with the early years of the reform era had its origins in the reading quests of the rusticated educated youth. Moreover, these reading quests also anticipate how as a group these youths – many of them social and political outcasts at the time – would transform into the literary, cultural and / or intellectual elite of the early reform years.\n","title":"Lena Henningsen to Present at the Rethinking Modern Chinese Elites Conference in Aix-Marseille on 10-12 June","type":"article"},{"content":" ChinaComx is coorganising this year’s conference of the German Chinese teacher’s association - Fachverband Chinesisch e.V.. The trilingual conference is entitled “Crossing Borders, Teaching China Competence” and will be held at Heidelberg’s Center for Asian and Transcultural Studies. For the program in PDF, click [here](ADD PDF).\nLena Henningsen will give a presentation on the ChinaComx translation project and its involvement in classroom settings: How translating comics is a meaningful and rewarding experience for students of Chinese – and how translated comics can be meaningfully integrated into the teaching about Chinese history, society, culture and literature among different students, ranging from middle schools to universities.\n","date":"28 April 2024","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/activities/2024-04-28-fachtagung2024/","section":"Activities","summary":" ChinaComx is coorganising this year’s conference of the German Chinese teacher’s association - Fachverband Chinesisch e.V.. The trilingual conference is entitled “Crossing Borders, Teaching China Competence” and will be held at Heidelberg’s Center for Asian and Transcultural Studies. For the program in PDF, click [here](ADD PDF).\nLena Henningsen will give a presentation on the ChinaComx translation project and its involvement in classroom settings: How translating comics is a meaningful and rewarding experience for students of Chinese – and how translated comics can be meaningfully integrated into the teaching about Chinese history, society, culture and literature among different students, ranging from middle schools to universities.\n","title":"The 2024 Conference of the German Chinese Teacher’s Association Coorganized by ChinaComx","type":"article"},{"content":" To give a first overview of the ChinaComx project outline, its goals, and research ideas, our PI, Lena Henningsen, will give a presentation at the CATS-Forum held on Friday 26 January 2024, between 11 am (c.t.) – ca. 2 pm, in room 400.02.12 in the Karl Jaspers Centre.\n","date":"25 January 2024","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/activities/2024-01-25-catsforum2024/","section":"Activities","summary":" To give a first overview of the ChinaComx project outline, its goals, and research ideas, our PI, Lena Henningsen, will give a presentation at the CATS-Forum held on Friday 26 January 2024, between 11 am (c.t.) – ca. 2 pm, in room 400.02.12 in the Karl Jaspers Centre.\n","title":"Lena Henningsen to Present ChinaComx at the CATS-Forum 2024","type":"article"},{"content":" Welcome to this new research project titled \u0026ldquo;ChinaComx: Comics Culture in the People\u0026rsquo;s Republic of China\u0026rdquo;!\nIn the Activities tab you will find all upcoming and past talks, events, and other activities related to the project; To learn more about the project, see About. You can also visit our page at the website of the Institute of Chinese Studies at Heidelberg University here; The team members introduce themselves here: Team; Under the Translations tab you will be redirected to our ongoing repository of Chinese comics in translation; To read our project-related research output, head over to Publications; We are preparing a comprehensive bibliography and collection of links related to all things lianhuanhua, to be featured in the Resources tab. And if you want to get in touch with us — please do! — see Contact for details.\n","date":"15 January 2024","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/activities/2024-01-15-welcome/","section":"Activities","summary":" Welcome to this new research project titled “ChinaComx: Comics Culture in the People’s Republic of China”!\nIn the Activities tab you will find all upcoming and past talks, events, and other activities related to the project; To learn more about the project, see About. You can also visit our page at the website of the Institute of Chinese Studies at Heidelberg University here; The team members introduce themselves here: Team; Under the Translations tab you will be redirected to our ongoing repository of Chinese comics in translation; To read our project-related research output, head over to Publications; We are preparing a comprehensive bibliography and collection of links related to all things lianhuanhua, to be featured in the Resources tab. And if you want to get in touch with us — please do! — see Contact for details.\n","title":"ERC-ChinaComx Begins Its Journey Into the World of Chinese Comics","type":"article"},{"content":" ChinaComx investigates the intellectual, political, and transcultural dimensions of lianhuanhua (连环画)—literally \u0026ldquo;linked images\u0026rdquo;—the ubiquitous pocket-sized comic books of 20th-century China. The project studies lianhuanhua as a medium from the People’s Republic of China and its place within the larger Chinese and global comics culture. Studying the conditions of comic art’s production, distribution and consumption, the project sheds light on how comics contribute to the project of nation building, to the creation of a new socialist man and to the continued legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). In addition, it investigates how these at times highly propagandistic texts were read by ordinary citizens.\nExplore ChinaComx: Check our latest Activities, meet the Team, read our Publications, or browse our repositories of Translations and Resources.\nFor most of the 20th century, pocket size comic books such as lianhuanhua were an integral part of Chinese everyday reading culture, providing readers with entertainment, information and/or political instruction. Established as such throughout the 1920s and 1930s, after 1949 these comic books continued to range from adaptations of literary texts or films to hagiographies of socialist heroes like Lei Feng to stories propagating the usefulness of using fertilizer in agricultural production. Published as handy pocket-sized booklets, they were shared among children and adult readers alike to be read at street stall libraries or at work units after hours. Lianhuanhua production was massive, with an estimated 50.000 titles published since the founding of the PRC. This popularity continued into the early post-Mao years, which saw a broadening in styles and contents, including lianhuanhua delving into the hardships suffered during the Cultural Revolution; lianhuanhua in expressive wood cut; and unofficial adaptations of the American blockbuster Star Wars. Moreover, allegedly, one in three books published in 1986 was a comic!\nIn clearly circumscribed case studies covering developments from the late 1940s to the present, the project analyzes:\nAdaptations: Large amounts of literary and filmic adaptations. Text-Image Relations: The conventions of text-image relations, as well as the breaking of these conventions. Narrative and Visual Language: Narrative qualities and a visual language heavily indebted to other art forms, including traditional Chinese visual art, cartoons, propaganda posters, photography, and movies. Global Connections: Changing cultural, political, and economic links within the socialist cultural sphere, the Greater China region, East Asia, and beyond, focusing on practices and meaning-making. Domestic and Foreign Dynamics: The distinct and changing relationships between domestic and foreign elements, situating concrete phenomena within larger developments and traditions. In providing more knowledge about comic culture from China and in contributing to theoretical debates, ChinaComx aims to delineate the term lianhuanhua as a distinct genre and area of academic research that bears specific characteristics, being embedded in a particular context of origin, yet, changing across time and space as Japanese manga, Korean manhwa, or Franco-Belgian bandes desinnées.\nImage source: https://chinareading.wordpress.com/2022/08/10/little-boy-reading-a-comic-book-1980s/\nFunding and hosting institutions # Funded by the European Union (ERC, Grant ID: 101088049). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency. We are located at the Centre for Asian and Transcultural Studies, Institute of Chinese Studies, Heidelberg University. Affiliated with the Heidelberg University, supporting the ChinaComx project through hosting and academic resources. ","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/about/","section":"ChinaComx","summary":" ChinaComx investigates the intellectual, political, and transcultural dimensions of lianhuanhua (连环画)—literally “linked images”—the ubiquitous pocket-sized comic books of 20th-century China. The project studies lianhuanhua as a medium from the People’s Republic of China and its place within the larger Chinese and global comics culture. Studying the conditions of comic art’s production, distribution and consumption, the project sheds light on how comics contribute to the project of nation building, to the creation of a new socialist man and to the continued legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). In addition, it investigates how these at times highly propagandistic texts were read by ordinary citizens.\n","title":"About","type":"page"},{"content":" Ph.D. Candidate | Computational investigation of lianhuanhua # My research focuses on lianhuanhua as a genre, exploring the messages and ideologies conveyed through these works using computational approaches. Employing visual language models and computational literary techniques, I analyze the depiction and evolution of specific characters, with particular attention to the hero archetype in lianhuanhua. Through a large-scale examination of lianhuanhua published after 1949, I investigate how heroes and related characters are shaped, identifying their defining traits and actions, and tracking how these representations evolved over time. My work seeks to uncover the underlying processes of collective construction that inform these portrayals. I also study the themes and narrative structures in lianhuanhua, identifying recurring patterns across varied stories to better understand how key messages and concepts are expressed and reshaped over time.\nResearch interests # digital humanities / text image relationship / archetypes and figures recognition\nContact \u0026amp; socials # 📧 Email | 👨🏻‍💻 ResearchGate | 🟢 ORCiD | ⚫️ GitHub\n","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/team/aijia/","section":"Team","summary":" Ph.D. Candidate | Computational investigation of lianhuanhua # My research focuses on lianhuanhua as a genre, exploring the messages and ideologies conveyed through these works using computational approaches. Employing visual language models and computational literary techniques, I analyze the depiction and evolution of specific characters, with particular attention to the hero archetype in lianhuanhua. Through a large-scale examination of lianhuanhua published after 1949, I investigate how heroes and related characters are shaped, identifying their defining traits and actions, and tracking how these representations evolved over time. My work seeks to uncover the underlying processes of collective construction that inform these portrayals. I also study the themes and narrative structures in lianhuanhua, identifying recurring patterns across varied stories to better understand how key messages and concepts are expressed and reshaped over time.\n","title":"Aijia Zhang","type":"page"},{"content":" Ph.D. Candidate | Aesthetics and theories of lianhuanhua I work on modern Chinese literature and culture, with a main focus on popular culture and visual texts such as comics and picturebooks. My doctoral thesis investigates the aesthetic features and political functions of a Chinese comics genre, lianhuanhua, which was extensively published during the 20th century and enjoyed a wide-ranging readership across different age groups. Based on the political environment and literary production in Maoist China (1949-1976), my project examines how lianhuanhua were designed to reshape youth, construct their political and national identities, and mold them into New Socialist Individuals. My research methods include archival research, image-text analysis, and adaptation theories. I am also interested in children’s literature, game studies, and fan studies.\nResearch interests # visual texts / modern China / role models / youth studies\nContact \u0026amp; socials # 📧 Email | 🟢 ORCiD | ⚫️ GitHub\n","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/team/astrid/","section":"Team","summary":" Ph.D. Candidate | Aesthetics and theories of lianhuanhua I work on modern Chinese literature and culture, with a main focus on popular culture and visual texts such as comics and picturebooks. My doctoral thesis investigates the aesthetic features and political functions of a Chinese comics genre, lianhuanhua, which was extensively published during the 20th century and enjoyed a wide-ranging readership across different age groups. Based on the political environment and literary production in Maoist China (1949-1976), my project examines how lianhuanhua were designed to reshape youth, construct their political and national identities, and mold them into New Socialist Individuals. My research methods include archival research, image-text analysis, and adaptation theories. I am also interested in children’s literature, game studies, and fan studies.\n","title":"Astrid Xiao","type":"page"},{"content":"","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/categories/","section":"Categories","summary":"","title":"Categories","type":"categories"},{"content":" If you have any questions, suggestions or inquiries, feel free to reach out to us using the form below — or write us an email directly here: Name: Surname: Affiliation (leave empty if none): Email: Message: Submit ","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/contact/","section":"ChinaComx","summary":" If you have any questions, suggestions or inquiries, feel free to reach out to us using the form below — or write us an email directly here: Name: Surname: Affiliation (leave empty if none): Email: Message: Submit ","title":"Contact","type":"page"},{"content":" Postdoctoral Researcher | Lianhuanhua in and out of the hands of politics At ChinaComx, I research the politics behind and within lianhuanhua. I approach these palm-sized booklets as a distinctively affective medium that bridged state propaganda and popular entertainment. Specifically, my sub-project explores such themes as: the relationship between political campaigns and lianhuanhua; occurrences of Maoism (as both ideology and state bureaucracy) within storylines; various depictions of political and national enemies; uses of lianhuanhua as manuals for new socialist knowledge and norms of behavior; as well as questions related to the role of lianhuanhua in the project of socialist modernisation.\nBeyond my historical research, I serve as the project’s coordinator for graphic and web design, overseeing the visual identity and digital curatorship efforts of our output, and aid the ongoing expansion of the CATS-Seifert Collection of Chinese Comics.\nPrior to joining Heidelberg University, I contributed to the research projects “The Politics of Reading in the PRC“ and \u0026ldquo;The Maoist Legacy: Party Dictatorship, Transitional Justice and the Politics of Truth\u0026rdquo; at the University of Freiburg. I am also an editor and collaborator in the ongoing international project “Revisiting the Revolution: Engaging Chinese Scholarship through Collaborative Translation”. My first monograph, currently in preparation, tackles the phenomenon of political study and other collective reading practices in the PRC.\nVisit my personal website for more details about my work.\nResearch interests # PRC history / propaganda \u0026amp; political communication / visual culture / state socialism / photography, film \u0026amp; politics\nContact \u0026amp; socials # 📧 Email | 🎓 Institute website | 👨🏻‍💻 ResearchGate | 🟢 ORCiD | ⚫️ GitHub | 🦋 Bluesky | 📚 Website\n","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/team/damian/","section":"Team","summary":" Postdoctoral Researcher | Lianhuanhua in and out of the hands of politics At ChinaComx, I research the politics behind and within lianhuanhua. I approach these palm-sized booklets as a distinctively affective medium that bridged state propaganda and popular entertainment. Specifically, my sub-project explores such themes as: the relationship between political campaigns and lianhuanhua; occurrences of Maoism (as both ideology and state bureaucracy) within storylines; various depictions of political and national enemies; uses of lianhuanhua as manuals for new socialist knowledge and norms of behavior; as well as questions related to the role of lianhuanhua in the project of socialist modernisation.\n","title":"Damian Mandzunowski","type":"page"},{"content":" Ph.D. Candidate | Lianhuanhua fan culture and collective memory study My dissertation explores the engagement of ordinary citizens with lianhuanhua and the formation of its fan culture in Shanghai after the 1940s. I aim to provide a comprehensive understanding of how ordinary Chinese citizens collectively remember lianhuanhua and how fandom evolved within the broader context of national construction. Specifically, I focus on temporary bookstalls, Xinhua Bookstores, and private collections, which offer promising insights into reading habits and activities. This study utilizes a wide range of archival materials, field observations, and interviews to illustrate the relationships between the production, dissemination, and consumption of lianhuanhua on the street. My research interests also include various aspects of fan culture, Japanese comics, and exhibitions.\nResearch interests # fan culture / cultural memory / comics study\nContact \u0026amp; socials # 📧 Email | 👨🏻‍💻 ResearchGate | 🟢 ORCiD | ⚫️ GitHub\n","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/team/jiu/","section":"Team","summary":" Ph.D. Candidate | Lianhuanhua fan culture and collective memory study My dissertation explores the engagement of ordinary citizens with lianhuanhua and the formation of its fan culture in Shanghai after the 1940s. I aim to provide a comprehensive understanding of how ordinary Chinese citizens collectively remember lianhuanhua and how fandom evolved within the broader context of national construction. Specifically, I focus on temporary bookstalls, Xinhua Bookstores, and private collections, which offer promising insights into reading habits and activities. This study utilizes a wide range of archival materials, field observations, and interviews to illustrate the relationships between the production, dissemination, and consumption of lianhuanhua on the street. My research interests also include various aspects of fan culture, Japanese comics, and exhibitions.\n","title":"Jiu Song","type":"page"},{"content":" Principal Investigator | Adaptations into lianhuanhua Within the ChinaComx project, I currently work on a monograph on adaptations of the works and biography of Lu Xun into lianhuanhua. I am fascinated how these works inscribed Lu Xun into the revolutionary pantheon and into the literary canon of socialist China – while at the same time preserving the ambivalence so deeply ingrained in the works and life of Lu Xun. I also enjoy organizing workshops, translating lianhuanhua, preparing other people’s translations for our webpage and publishing widely on Chinese literature and culture.\nBefore returning to Heidelberg (where I did my PhD and a PostDoc), I was a Junior Professor at Freiburg University and headed another ERC project, devoted to the practices of reading in the People’s Republic of China, interspersed by research stays at TU Munich and Oxford University.\nResearch interests # Chinese literature and culture / adaptation / cultural history / reading culture(s) in contemporary China\nContact \u0026amp; socials # 📧 Email | 🎓 Institute website | 👨🏻‍💻 ResearchGate | 🟢 ORCiD | ⚫️ GitHub\n","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/team/lena/","section":"Team","summary":" Principal Investigator | Adaptations into lianhuanhua Within the ChinaComx project, I currently work on a monograph on adaptations of the works and biography of Lu Xun into lianhuanhua. I am fascinated how these works inscribed Lu Xun into the revolutionary pantheon and into the literary canon of socialist China – while at the same time preserving the ambivalence so deeply ingrained in the works and life of Lu Xun. I also enjoy organizing workshops, translating lianhuanhua, preparing other people’s translations for our webpage and publishing widely on Chinese literature and culture.\n","title":"Lena Henningsen","type":"page"},{"content":" In this section, all project-related publications by the ChinaComx team will be listed ongoingly: Author Title Source Date Link Damian Mandzunowski Book Review: Daisy Yan Du, Animated Encounters: Transnational Movements of Chinese Animation, 1940s-1970s (University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2019), 258pp Animation Studies 2.0 19/08/2025 (online) https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+2197(https://blog.animationstudies.org/?p=7281) Lena Henningsen, Daniel Leese, Damian Mandzunowski (Hg.) Wissensasymmetrien. China als Akteur und Objekt (globaler) Debatten Jahrbuch der Deutschen Vereinigung für Chinastudien 18 (Harrassowitz, 2025) 30/07/2025 ISBN ↗ Lena Henningsen The Author is Dead! Long Live the Author! The Death and Legacy of Lu Xun in Chinese Lianhuanhua Comics Closure. Kieler Journal für Comicforschung 11 (2025): 59-80 30/04/2025 (online) https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+2197(http://www.closure.uni-kiel.de/closure11/henningsen) Laura Pozzi, Damian Mandzunowski Jiang Qing, the Iconic Anti-icon: Visual Dissection of Female Political Power in Post-Mao People\u0026rsquo;s Republic of China positions 32 (3): 539–572 01/08/2024 DOI ↗ Lena Henningsen, Damian Mandzunowski Book Review: John A. Lent \u0026amp; Xu Ying, Comics Art in China (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2023 [2017]), 234pp Journal of Asian Pacific Communication 21/12/2023 (online) DOI ↗ ","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/publications/","section":"ChinaComx","summary":" In this section, all project-related publications by the ChinaComx team will be listed ongoingly: Author Title Source Date Link Damian Mandzunowski Book Review: Daisy Yan Du, Animated Encounters: Transnational Movements of Chinese Animation, 1940s-1970s (University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2019), 258pp Animation Studies 2.0 19/08/2025 (online) https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+2197(https://blog.animationstudies.org/?p=7281) Lena Henningsen, Daniel Leese, Damian Mandzunowski (Hg.) Wissensasymmetrien. China als Akteur und Objekt (globaler) Debatten Jahrbuch der Deutschen Vereinigung für Chinastudien 18 (Harrassowitz, 2025) 30/07/2025 ISBN ↗ Lena Henningsen The Author is Dead! Long Live the Author! The Death and Legacy of Lu Xun in Chinese Lianhuanhua Comics Closure. Kieler Journal für Comicforschung 11 (2025): 59-80 30/04/2025 (online) https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+2197(http://www.closure.uni-kiel.de/closure11/henningsen) Laura Pozzi, Damian Mandzunowski Jiang Qing, the Iconic Anti-icon: Visual Dissection of Female Political Power in Post-Mao People’s Republic of China positions 32 (3): 539–572 01/08/2024 DOI ↗ Lena Henningsen, Damian Mandzunowski Book Review: John A. Lent \u0026 Xu Ying, Comics Art in China (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2023 [2017]), 234pp Journal of Asian Pacific Communication 21/12/2023 (online) DOI ↗ ","title":"Publications","type":"page"},{"content":" In this hub, we provide lianhuanhua-related resources created by the ChinaComx Team: THE CHINACOMX LIANHUANHUA BIBLIOGRAPHY, v 1.5. We are happy to share our comprehensive reference list of selected scholarly publications on lianhuanhua—Chinese comics—compiled by the ChinaComx project (most recent update: 10 April 2025).\nThis list is to serve as both an entry point for students of Chinese visual culture and a curated snapshot of current scholarship. It is not a peer-reviewed bibliography, nor should exclusion from this list be taken as a negative judgment; it is simply a selection of texts we find particularly interesting at this moment and hope will be useful to other researchers.\nWe hope you might approach this list as an invitation: it invites you to read and engage with the vast academic literature on all things lianhuanhua; it invites you to share with us other publications that we might have overlooked; and it invites all of us to explore the fascinating world(s) of Chinese comics.\nDownload PDF We\u0026rsquo;re working on it: More resources coming soon!\n","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/resources/","section":"ChinaComx","summary":" In this hub, we provide lianhuanhua-related resources created by the ChinaComx Team: THE CHINACOMX LIANHUANHUA BIBLIOGRAPHY, v 1.5. We are happy to share our comprehensive reference list of selected scholarly publications on lianhuanhua—Chinese comics—compiled by the ChinaComx project (most recent update: 10 April 2025).\n","title":"Resources","type":"page"},{"content":"","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/tags/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"Tags","type":"tags"},{"content":" The ChinaComx core research team is dedicated to the study of lianhuanhua and Chinese comics culture. In particular, our core team and work packages consist of: Lena Henningsen Principal Investigator Writing about adaptations of literary texts into lianhuanhua with a specific focus on the literature of Lu Xun.\nDamian Mandzunowski Postdoctoral Researcher Working on the contemporary history of lianhuanhua through the lenses of politics, culture, and daily life.\nJiu Song Ph.D. Candidate Researching lianhuanhua fan culture and collective memory.\nAstrid Xiao Ph.D. Candidate Analyzing the aesthetics and theories of comics, particularly focusing on children’s lianhuanhua.\nAijia Zhang Ph.D. Candidate Identifying recurrent imageries in lianhuanhua with computational methods to understand identity building.\nChinaComx Visiting Scholars: # Amelia Kin Wai Chu June 2026 Chang Hasheminezhad-Li June 2026 Ivan Gomes July 2025 \u0026 Jan 2026 Dayton Lekner July–Aug 2025 Lara Y. Yang July 2025 Research Assistants \u0026amp; Support: # Our current research assistant is Tilen Zupan. Previously, we enjoyed research assistance from Jérémy Biehler, Xiaojie Chang, Qin Gu, Bettina Jin, and Veronica Ludwiczak.\nFor our collaborative translations—past, present, and future—we are or have been collaborating with Ayiguzaili Aboduaini, Jérémy Biehler, Niklas Born, Nikolas Broy, Yun-Jou Chen, Britta Dick, Max Oidtmann, Haoran Xu, Jinyi Zhu, Tilen Zupan, and the ChinaComx Team.\nThe project is grateful for the administrative support from Jérémy Biehler, and for the past support from Jenja Tiede.\n","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/team/","section":"Team","summary":" The ChinaComx core research team is dedicated to the study of lianhuanhua and Chinese comics culture. In particular, our core team and work packages consist of: Lena Henningsen Principal Investigator Writing about adaptations of literary texts into lianhuanhua with a specific focus on the literature of Lu Xun.\n","title":"Team","type":"page"}]