On 23 December 2023, Yale Center Beijing successfully hosted the workshop “Reform/Gaige/Perestroika: Text, Theory, Aesthetics.”

The workshop was convened by Jinyi Chu, Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University, and co-sponsored by Yale's Council on East Asian Studies, Yale Center Beijing, and the International Center for Critical Theory at Peking University.

It aims to bridge the existing gaps between East Asianists in the United States and scholars of post-Maoist Chinese culture in China. Given the divergent cultural and geopolitical lenses through which China and the U.S. interpret history, it is paramount to scrutinize these disparities through academic discourse, facilitating a bilateral dialogue.

Participants included scholars from institutions such as Yale University, New York University, Tsinghua University, Peking University, Renmin University, Zhejiang University, Wuhan University, The Central Academy of Drama, Beijing Film Academy, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Chinese National Academy of Arts, China Film Archive, and the National Museum of Modern Chinese Literature.

The topics of discussion encompass new directions in literature, film, art, popular culture, reinterpretation of classics, and global intellectual and cultural networks during the reform period. Participants reached a consensus that the era of reform was not only a time of further integration of China with the global market, but also a period marked by new media interactions and the emergence of the aesthetics of reform that reverberated worldwide.