Essay: Everlasting Inscription (铭刻未央)

by Darren Jorgensen and Tami Xiang

Wang Qingsong’s monumental photography unveils the deep structures of Chinese history and society. The title of the first survey of Wang’s work in Australia, exhibited at the Cullity Gallery in the School of Design at the University of Western Australia, is Everlasting Inscription. It attempts to describe Wang’s resistance to the forgetting of Chinese history, while illuminating the structural legacies by which life in China assumes its collective shape.

Issue 190, October 2025 – New Views From China – Postgraduate Perspectives From Chengdu

This special issue is a product of over a decade of collaboration between Thesis Eleven and Sichuan University’s College of Literature and Journalism. The issue provides a platform for emerging Chengdu scholars and developed around the idea that this younger generation of Masters students might consider writing less directly in their immediate fields of research and more in terms of general and personal interest. It offers a window into some of the concerns and patterns of thinking of the next generation and the worlds that they inhabit, where tradition and modernity intersect.

COVID-19 remapping East Asian Modernity

by Mark Harrison

The political meaning of the virus is contending constantly with its biological realities. But as its transmission has slowed in Asia, it is leaving behind newly calcified traces of the long-standing enmities, political compromises and aspirations of different modernist visions set in place in the early 20th century history of modernisation in Asia.

Institutional and Personal Engagement in the Response to the Covid-19 Medical Crisis, A View from Inside China

by Sikong Zhao

This short essay aims at reflecting upon the way the Covid-19 crisis has consolidated the popular Chinese perception of the connection between official institutions, party membership and grass-roots participatory politics with Chinese characteristics. Nation-wide expectations for effective management, organizational capabilities and rapid implementation have been very popular in a country with more than 1.4 billion people.