New Fellowship awards ceremony in 2023

At the dinner celebrating the conclusion of the 8th Global China Dialogue and the 10th Anniversary of the Global China Academy, new GCA fellowships were awarded. This was followed by messages and videos from absent GCA Fellows. The sessions were chaired by

• Professor Elena Semino (埃琳娜 · 塞米诺) FAcSS, FRSA, GCD Organizing Committee member, Director of the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science, Lancaster University (left in photo) 
• Presentation of certificates, reading greeting messages & watching videos from absent GCA Fellows and GCD 8 speakers, Professor Tony McEnery 托尼·麦肯尼教授 FAcSS FRSA FGCA and Chair of Global China Academy Council, Council Member of the Academy of Social Sciences, Distinguished Professor of English Language and Linguistics at Lancaster University (right in photo)

Representative of GCA Fellows, Professor Robin Cohen (罗宾·科恩) FGCA, Emeritus Professor and former Director of the International Migration Institute, University of Oxford, delivered greetings.

He emphasizes the academic community’s role in addressing global challenges such as wars, violence, and ecological imbalance. He praises historical contributions like Ancient Chinese wisdom and the European Enlightenment, while cautioning against past arrogance and imperialism. Advocating for ‘planetary universalism’ or a ‘New Enlightenment,’ Cohen calls for dialogue, pluralism, and tolerance, inspired by the ideas of reciprocity and transculturality that the GCA promotes. He concludes with a toast to the success of building a global society based on these principles.

Dr Frances Wood (吴芳思), a Trustee of the Global China Academy Board of Trustees and former Curator of Chinese Collections at the British Library, presented certificates to GCA Fellows and Associate Fellows.

GCA Fellows: 

• Professor HOU Shiyuan (郝时远), Academician and former Associate President and former Director of the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology at Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (Absent, in China).
• Professor Nora Ann Colton (诺拉·安·科尔顿), Director of the UCL Global Business School for Health (GBSH) (Absent, in Manila).
• Professor LI Linxue (李麟学), Dean of the College of Arts and Media at Tongji University, China

GCA Aassociate Fellows:

• Professor QIAN Yufang (钱毓芳), Director of Institute of Corpus and Discourse Studies, School of Foreign Studies, Zhejiang Gongshang University, China; Editor of the Journal of Corpus Approaches to Chinese Social Sciences

• Dr Gavin Brookes (加文·布鲁克斯), Reader in Linguistics and UKRI Future Leader Fellow with an interest in corpus linguistics, discourse analysis and health communication, Lancaster University, UK, Executive Editor of the Journal of Corpus Approaches to Chinese Social Sciences

• Professor WANG Xin (王鑫), Head of Department of Communication, College of Arts and Media, Tongji University, China; Executive Editor of the Journal of China in Global and Comparative Perspectives (Chinese Edition, absent, in China)

Professor Xiangqun Chang (常向群) FRSA, FGCA, President of the Global China Academy, presented certificates to GCA Institutional Fellows:

• The UCL Global Business School for Health (GBSH）

• The ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science at Lancaster University, UK

• The College of Arts and Media at Tongji University, China

• The Institute of Linguistics, Sun Yat-sen University, China (absent, in China)

Afterwards, Professor Tony McEnery (托尼·麦肯内里), FAcSS, FRSA, FGCA and Chair of the Global China Academy Council and Council Member of the Academy of Social Sciences, as well as Distinguished Professor of English Language and Linguistics at Lancaster University, chaired the final session. This session featured the demonstration of greeting messages, and videos were played from some absent GCA Fellows.

The messages are: 

• Congratulations on the opening of the 8th Global China Dialogue. The Dialogue is most urgent at the current stage of world history. — Professor KOMAI Hiroshi（駒井 洋) FGCA, a Japanese sociologist and Professor Emeritus at the University of Tsukuba and Shigakukan University, Japan. 
• The Global China Academy is a highly influential and prestigious international institution that promotes a very fruitful and intense dialogue between social scientists from China and various countries. Over the last ten years, the number of academic events, journals and other publications by Global Century Press has been very high. As a Life Fellow of the GCA, I am truly honoured to participate in the scientific life of this esteemed institution. I hope we will establish more and more cooperation in sociology, especially regarding what my Chinese colleagues and I call the Post-Western theory, to develop more dialogic and non-hegemonic social sciences. This aims to open new academic spaces and produce hybridizations between localized knowledge in China and Europe. It is a significant challenge for the future of social sciences. Happy Birthday to the GCA; wishing it great success and a very bright future! — Professor Laurence Roulleau-Berger (罗兰), FGCA, Emeritus Research Director at the National Centre for Scientific Research (NCSR).

The speakers and transcripts of video messages are: 

• Professor XIE Lizhong (谢立中) FGCA and Chinese President of Global China Academy, Distinguished Chair Professor and former head of Department of Sociology of Peking University, China

Good evening, everyone: I’m delighted to extend my congratulations on the successful conclusion of the 8th Global China Dialogue. This year also marks a significant milestone—the 10th anniversary of the Global China Academy’s establishment. Congratulations to all involved in this remarkable journey.  Over the past decade, thanks to your concern, support, and active participation, the Global China Academy has successfully organized many activities. Additionally, Global Century Press has published a wide range of uncensored works on China, significantly contributing to the promotion of scholarly exchange in China studies worldwide. Looking ahead, I sincerely hope the Global China Academy will continue to receive your unwavering support, enabling it to grow and excel even further. 

• Professor Carsten Herrmann-Pillath (何梦笔) FGCA and Vice President of Global China Academy, Permanent Fellow at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies, Erfurt University, Germany

Ten years at Global China Academy, my heartfelt congratulations. What a decade: Trumpism, COVID-19, all these geopolitical tensions rising and creating an increasing distance between China and the so-called West. I think this is really a worrying trend, and an institution like the Global China Academy has a task to contribute to reversing this trend.

When I was a student, there was a China scholar who was famous, or I would say even infamous, for his neologism when dealing with China. One of his favorite neologisms was ‘impansionism.’ He argued that China was never, and will never be, a political power that pursues expansion in global terms like in the past, and some would say even today. Western countries define ‘impansionism’ as being just attractive to the world, just attracting people, capital, all that without doing anything. That’s deep, as you know, in the Taoist principle, the principle of non-action, Wu Wei. And I’m afraid that in the past decade, somehow, China also lost part of this wisdom.

I strongly believe, and that’s what I’ve experienced in my career of almost 40 years now dealing with China, that China is incredibly attractive and has always been incredibly attractive.  That was also the topic in my video message last year. An institution like the Global China Academy can contribute exactly to this, making China attractive to the world. This does not mean to embellish China, but simply opening up, telling the truth, and also entering critical discourse. Actually, to a large degree, what is often called liberal values is the key to openness. And also, I think a key to non-action. China does not need to be afraid of any flies entering an open window. That’s what Mr. Weggel argued. It is true, about thousands of years of history of Chinese civilization. I wish Global China Academy the best for the next decade, that it will contribute to communicating Chinese thinking, Chinese debates, Chinese ideas to the world, and entering a multilateral intellectual dialogue. Thank you. 

• Professor Shigeto Sonoda (園田 茂人) FGCA and Vice-President of Global China Academy, Professor of comparative sociology and Asian studies at the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia, University of Tokyo, Japan

Hello, my name is Sonoda Shigeto, a Professor of Sociology and Asian Studies at the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia at the University of Tokyo. Congratulations on the 10th anniversary of the Global China Academy. As you know, a variety of opinion polls reveal that people’s ideas and evaluations regarding the rise of China differ significantly from one country to another, even among Asian countries. Thus, I think it’s quite necessary for intellectuals to promote dialogue, especially intellectual dialogues between people in China and those in the global community. I hope that the Global China Academy will continue promoting these intellectual dialogues. Thank you. 

• Professor Peter van der Veer (彼得·范德维尔) FGCA, Emeritus Professor and former Director of the Study of Religious Diversity at the Max Planck Institute, Germany.

Dear colleagues at the Global China Academy, I’m terribly sorry I cannot be present at the event today, as I’m currently in China serving as a visiting faculty member at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou. I’m very pleased to be back in China. I have not been here for more than three years, and it’s really important to reestablish contacts after the Covid period, especially when academic exchange has become threatened. I believe that the Global China Academy can play an important role in this effort of reestablishing contact. I wish you much success. 

• Professor Prasenjit Duara (杜赞奇) FGCA, Distinguished Professor of East Asian Studies, Duke University, USA 

Good day, everybody. My name is Prasenjit Duara, and my Chinese name is DU Zanqi. I am the Oscar Tang Professor at Duke University. I was a student of China and global history. As a Fellow of the Global China Academy, I’m delighted to congratulate the Academy on conducting the 8th Global China Dialogue. In a period of increasing tensions around the world, which is making life so difficult for many millions of people, it is, I believe, imperative that as scholars, we maintain open dialogue in various areas of life between the major powers.

As someone originally from India, I also believe China and India should open more lines of dialogue and exchange. We need to create a global civil society that is invested in dialogue for peace. And now, have a productive conference and my best wishes to all of you. Goodbye now. 

• Professor GU Yueguo (顾曰国) FGCA, Emeritus Research Professor of Linguistics in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), Former Pro-Vice-Chancellor, Beijing Foreign Studies University, China.

Hello there, I’m Gu Yueguo, an absent fellow greeting everybody from Beijing, PRC, because I have immersed myself in two national projects on gerontic discourse which I must complete. I miss everybody, and the 10th GCA anniversary dinner in particular. Have a good time in London. 

• Professor HOU Shiyuan (郝时远) FGCA, Academician and former Associate President and former Director of the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology at Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

Hello to all the experts, I am Hao Shuyuan from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. First of all, I would like to express my heartfelt congratulations on the 10th anniversary of the Global China Academy’s series of important academic achievements. At the same time, I am also very pleased to have received academic honors. I would like to specially thank Professor Xiangqun Chang and the experts who recommended me to join the academic team of the Global China Academy. Here, I can only simply express a wish and convey my own desire. That is to say, receiving academic honours is in fact also taking on an academic responsibility.

In the future, I am willing to engage in academic exchanges and cooperation with all my colleagues at the Global China Academy and jointly make our own efforts to fulfill this academic responsibility. Thank you all. 

• Professor BING Zheng 邴正教授 FGCA, former Executive Vice-President of Jilin University; former Vice-President of the Chinese Sociological Association, China.

On this joyous occasion of the 10th anniversary of the establishment of the Global China Academy, I would like to express my heartfelt thanks and sincere congratulations to the Global China Academy and Professor Chang Xiangqun.

Since its establishment, the Global China Academy has actively organized scholars from China and the UK, strengthening academic and cultural exchanges and promoting academic communication and publication activities. It has played a very important role in organizing academic events and connecting scholars, building a bridge between Chinese and British scholars. Through this bridge, many Chinese and British scholars have enhanced their understanding, exchanged academic ideas, tightened their connections, and fostered friendships through mutual exchanges and visits.

Therefore, I wholeheartedly wish the Global China Academy to attract more talented individuals, gather more academic strength, jointly promote Sino-British friendship, and advance academic research around globalization, leading to more academic exchanges and scholarly achievements. 

• Click here to visit the 10th GCA Dinner session Part I – Presenting cirtificates to new Fellows
•  Click here to visit the 10th GCA Dinner session Part II – Playing multimedia messages from absent fellows and speakers. 
• Click here to visit the 10th GCA Reception session – Launch GCA and GCP two new websites.
• Click here to visit the 8th GCD webpage.