Political Science Department Chair and Asian and Asian American MA Student present paper in Singapore

Conference organizer Francis Khek Gee Lim (Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, Nanyang Technological University), Teresa Zimmerman-Liu AAAS MA student and Teresa Wright, Chair, Department of Political Science

On January 8, Teresa Wright, Chair of Political Science and Asian and Asian American Studies M.A. student Teresa Zimmerman-Liu presented a co-authored paper, entitled “Making Sense of China’s State-Society Relations: Protestant House Churches in the Reform Era,” at a conference on “Christianity in Contemporary China: Socio-Cultural Perspectives,” sponsored by Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Participants included scholars from across the globe, including Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, China, Taiwan, England, Australia, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, and the United States. The keynote speakers were accomplished senior scholars Richard Madsen (Chair and Distinguished Professor of Sociology at UCSD) and Peter Tze Ming Ng (Director of the Centre for the Study of Religion and Chinese Society at the Chinese University of Hong Kong).

Following the conference, Wright and Zimmerman-Liu traveled to Hong Kong, where they conducted interviews for further research. Perhaps the most well-known interview subject was Han Dongfang. Mr. Han was the most prominent worker activist to assume a leadership role during the 1989 “Tiananmen Square Movement.” After surviving prison following the June 4, 1989 massacre, Mr. Han returned to Hong Kong to continue his activism promoting labor rights in China. Through his Hong Kong-based organization, the China Labour Bulletin, Mr. Han hosts a weekly call-in radio show broadcast into mainland China via Radio Free Asia. He is known world-wide as China’s most influential labor activist. While in Hong Kong they discussed their current and future research with faculty at the Divinity School of Chung Chi College at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.