Professor Paul Bailey
Biography
An honours graduate in Chinese at Leeds University, he taught at Lingnan College, Hong Kong (1973-5) before completing an MA in East Asian History & Politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London) and then a PhD in Chinese history at the University of British Columbia, Canada, during which time he spent a year at Beijing University, China (1980-1) as a British Council postgraduate scholar. He held a lectureship in Chinese at the University of Durham before being appointed lecturer in East Asian history at the University of Edinburgh in 1985. He was promoted to Reader in 1997. A recipient of a Leverhulme Scholarship to do archival research in China (1990), he has been a Visiting Research Fellow at Taiwan National University (1997) and the Centre of Asian Studies, University of Hong Kong (2000), and has twice been a British Academy Exchange Scholar in China (1995, 2000). He has been editor of the Bulletin of the British Association of Chinese Studies, and has served as External Examiner for taught postgraduate courses in East Asian languages, history and politics at the Universities of Newcastle and Durham. He is course director for the taught postgraduate MSc in Gender History (in the School of History & Classics), and contributes a core module on Chinese society and culture to the taught postgraduate MChS (Master of Chinese Studies) in the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures, and an optional module on Chinese cinema to the taught postgraduate MSc in Film Studies (also in the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures). He was awarded a Personal Chair in Modern Chinese History in 2007.
Title of Paper
‘Transnational Diasporas’: The Case of Li Shizeng in China and France 1902-1928
Abstract
Li Shizeng (1881-1973) was one of the most intriguing political and cultural figures in twentieth century China. Son of a late Qing court official, he studied in France in the early years of the twentieth century and became the most prominent member of a group of Francophile Chinese radicals who enthusiastically advocated Chinese overseas study in France and Sino-French cultural interaction. This paper explores Li Shizeng’s role in this interaction to illuminate the ways in which Chinese intellectuals such as Li, far from being the passive recipients and imbibers of ‘superior’ western knowledge, actively engaged with, and participated in, global knowledge and connections. In his transnational educational initiatives and ability to operate in different socio-political circles transcending domestic and national boundaries, Li Shizeng enacted (and embodied) a type of cultural ‘deterritorialisation’ that facilitated the imagining of multiple ‘spaces’. As such, the paper concludes, Li Shizeng represented a new and modern kind of intellectual.