Sinocentric Imaginings: The Asian Inter-Varsity Debates in Singapore in 1986 and 1988

In July 1986 and April 1988, Singapore hosted the first and second Asian Inter-Varsity Debates (Yazhou dazhuan bianlunhui or AIVD), a televised Mandarin debate competition featuring universities from Singapore, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, Malaysia, and, most prominently, the People’s Republic of China (PRC). On both occasions, the team from the PRC emerged victorious: Peking University defeated the Chinese University of Hong Kong in the 1986 final, while Fudan University triumphed over National Taiwan University in 1988 in what represented the first competitive encounter between students from both sides of the Taiwan Strait at a time when martial law in Taiwan was ending. This talk draws chiefly upon local newspaper reports and PRC narratives of the AIVD to argue that the debates were constitutive of Singapore's emergence as a major "peripheral" site for imagining "China" and "Chineseness" in the Reform Era Sinophone world. Focusing on PRC, Singaporean, and, to a lesser extent, Taiwanese perspectives, it pays close attention to social encounters on the sidelines of both tournaments, and to how various parties, from the debaters themselves to members of the public, articulated their experiences using the language of Sinocentrism.

About the Speaker

Chien-Wen Kung received his Ph.D. in History from Columbia University and is an Assistant Professor of History at the National University of Singapore. He is the author of Diasporic Cold Warriors: Nationalist China, Anticommunism, and the Philippine Chinese, 1930s-1970s (Cornell University Press, 2022) and is currently working on a cultural and intellectual history of Chineseness in late-20th century Singapore.

The ANU China Seminar Series is supported by the Australian Centre on China in the World at ANU College of Asia and the Pacific.