Rachel Leng

• Master of Arts
• Harvard University

Our world has and will continue to be changed forever by the COVID-19 pandemic. Industries will be disrupted, digital trends will accelerate, innovative markets will be created, emerging threats and diverse risks will develop, and different market leaders will rise in our new world. Ultimately, until a vaccine is developed that is proven to be sa...

Li Yongping’s writing displays an acute sensitivity to the changing cultural and historical positioning of the Sinophone Malaysian (Mahua) community and his own migratory experiences. This article focuses on Li’s incessant engagement with issues of gender and feminine sexuality in relation to the shifting biopolitical construction of a hybrid Sinop...

This paper will examine Kuo Pao Kun?s modern reiteration of the Zheng He theme in his 1995 Singaporean play titled Descendants of the Eunuch Admiral. The memory of Zheng He and his legacy rooted in an anomalous series of sea expeditions makes him unique in Chinese history and speaks to contemporary issues of multiculturalism, ethnic hybridity, and...

Even as China is central to the contemporary global economy, its socialist past continues to shape its capitalist present. This volume's contributors see contemporary China as haunted by the promises of capitalism, the institutional legacy of the Maoist regime, and the spirit of Marxist resistance. China's development does not result from historica...

This thesis engages with the praxis of diasporic Sinophone biopolitics across East Asia exploring travelling imaginaries, hybrid material cultures, and articulations of embodied difference striking across geopolitical and temporal boundaries. By considering the interfaces of ethnic Chinese across local cultures in Malaysia, Taiwan, Singapore, and H...

Although the development of civil society organisations in Japan occurred relatively late compared to Western and some developing countries, a growing number of scholarly works have documented modern Japan's rapid growth of citizen activism and social action. However, discourse on civil society in Japan has emphasised a pattern of numerous small lo...

Tongzhi Culture Rachel Leng reports on the broader significance of the Chinese gay rights movement In a Beijing restaurant, I sat down to lunch with two men and two women who have been married for more than three years. All four individuals are tongzhi in "sham marriages" (形婚xinghun) with each other in which gay men marry lesbians for the sake of p...

Eileen Chang has been described by critics as an unapologetically introspective and sentimental but largely apolitical writer. When most other writers of her time were concentrating on the grand and the abstract in exploring the May Fourth modernist spirit, Eileen Chang’s approach to her writing poignantly laid bare an intense interest in the moder...

In “Trippers and Askers,” the first chapter of Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989), the novel’s protagonist Wittman Ah Sing and his love interest, Nanci Lee, talk about the limited roles available to Chinese actors in American media. Nanci reflects on her experiences auditioning, complaining that a director criticized her...

Picture Yan Lianke's novel, Dream of Ding Village 《丁庄梦》 (2006), provides a fictional account of the decline of a village inflicted by AIDS, focusing on the experiences of the Ding family across three generations. The novel paints an alarming portrait of the trade-off between capitalist progress and human well-being as China acts in an increasingly...

This thesis considers Comrade Literature (同志文学 tongzhi wenxue), a genre of contemporary Chinese homosexual (tongzhi) fiction, as it has emerged on the internet in Mainland China. Although Comrade Literature first emerged in Hong Kong and Taiwan in the 1980s, it was only after the mid-1990s with the advent of the internet that these gay-themed ficti...

In recent years, cosplay fans gathering at anime conventions and events all over North America have attracted much public attention and media coverage. These fans, who often refer to themselves as otaku,1 wear elaborate costumes and makeup to embody various anime, manga, and related video game characters (Cooper-Chen, 2010; Eng, 2012a). The essence...

As a sub-genre of online Comrade Literature, Military Comrade Stories from mainland China stand out as a body of fiction that is direcdy concerned with the ramifications of social control in Chinese sociery. These stories address the ambiguous sphere of homosociality in the Chinese military experience by featuring tongqhi as men serving in China's...

On the night of February 10, 201 2, Steffi Hu was crowned the new Miss Chinatown, U.S.A. With this title, she would go on to act as a "goodwill ambassador,, promoting Chinese culture and heritage for the rest of the year. Sponsored by the Chinese Chamber of Commerce (CCC) as part of San Francisco's annual Lunar New Year celebrations, the Miss China...

On the night of February 10th, Steffi Hu was crowned Miss Chinatown U.S.A, 2012. She would go on to act as a "goodwill ambassador" promoting Chinese culture and heritage for the rest of the year Sponsored by the Chinese Chamber of Commerce (CCC) as part of San Francisco's annual Lunar New Year celebrations, the Miss Chinatown U.S.A. Pageant was ini...

This thesis explores the development of Mainland China's online "Comrade Literature" (同志文学 tongzhi wenxue), a body of fiction linked to the experiences of Chinese homosexuals that emerged in the late 1990s. The central question is: How has Chinese Comrade Literature responded to changes in political rhetoric and government policy affecting queer id...

The intensification of political conflict in recent years bears the imprint of new social developments, intercultural interactions and global influences transforming Taiwan, engendering a highly polymorphous society with different communities vying for their representative cultural voices (Liao 92). The emergent homosexual cultural politics in Taiw...

To fully understand such a slippery term as postmodernism, a central concern of this paper, the movementt literary and philosophical characteristics need to be examined. The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy describes the movement as a "complex set of reactions to modern philosophy and its presuppositions rather than any agreement on substantial d...