Yale Center Beijing and the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University jointly invite you to a conversation with Dr. Katerina Clark on "The Life of Emi Siao (1896-1983), Author of Mao Zedong: His Childhood & Youth".

Time and Location

Tuesday, June 28, 2016
Registration: 6:30 – 7:00pm
Talk and Q&A: 7:00 – 8:30pm

Yale Center Beijing
8 Jianguomenwai Avenue, 36th Floor, Tower B, IFC Building (Yong’anli Station, Exit C)

Registration and Fees

Ticket: RMB 15 for students; RMB 60 for others.

Click HERE to register via EventBank.

Please email yalecenterbeijing@yale.edu if you have any questions, or call Yale Center Beijing at (10) 5909 0200.

The Event

Professor Clark’s talk will review the career of the poet and revolutionary activist Emi Siao, a Chinese communist and childhood friend of Mao, who lived in both France and Soviet Russia and was connected with leftists from all over the world. In the early 1920s he studied in the Comintern’s Communist University for Toilers of the East, which trained international revolutionaries. After graduation, he led insurgents in the Shanghai workers’ suburb of Chapei in 1927. Like several other Chinese communist leaders, after the Shanghai debacle he turned from politics to literature; from 1930 he operated in Moscow as a writer, and as the broker for publishing Chinese works in Comintern-sponsored literary journals. He returned to China (Yan'an) in 1939 and remained there. His book about Mao’s childhood and youth became a classic.

LANGUAGE

The language of the event will be English.

The Speaker(s)

Katerina Clark
Professor of Comparative Literature and of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Yale Ph.D. '71

Katerina Clark, a native of Australia, received her B.A. from Melbourne University in 1963, her M.A. from Australian National University in 1966, and her Ph.D. from Yale in 1971. Her research interests include: Russian, European and Eurasian film, literature, performing arts, art, architecture and literary theory; cultural interactions; world literature; art and ideology.

Her publications include: Petersburg, Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), and Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931-1941 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011).