As part of the Fairbank Center’s exhibition of dazibao (大字报 “big-character posters”) and woodcuts from 1960s China, we present a four-part series on Cultural Revolution-era artworks. Xiaofei Tian, Professor of Chinese Literature at Harvard University, presents part 2: an exploration of the imagery and visual dynamism of dazibao.
Denise Ho, Assistant Professor of History at Yale University, presents part 1: an introduction to dazibao and their impact on Maoist China and beyond.
Ted Hui, Ph.D. candidate in Harvard’s Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, describes his experience creating an online course with HarvardX.
David Porter, Fairbank Center Graduate Student Associate, asks how two Russian men ended up in a Qing banner garrison in Guangdong in 1778, and their daring escape plan to return to Russia.
Graham James Chamness, Ph.D. candidate in East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University and Fairbank Center Graduate Student Associate, examines Confucian ideas of friendship in China’s pre-modern past.
Ian MacCormack explains how replicas of Tibet’s world-famous Potala Palace exemplify Buddhist understandings of what it means to be an “original” or a “copy,” and how one of these copies nearly became the Harvard-Yenching Institute.
Ruodi Duan — Ph.D. candidate in Harvard’s History Department — explains how Chinese depictions of African American internationalism and social movements help us better understand racial nationalism in the Cold War.
Keisha A. Brown, Assistant Professor of History at Tennessee State University, describes how traveling in China inspired her to research how blackness was historically perceived in modern China.
Heng Du — Ph.D. Candidate in Chinese Literature and Fairbank Center Graduate Student Associate —describes how Twitter #hashtags emulate the narrative setting of philosophical texts during China’s Warring States period.
