Christopher Chien

Education

PhD, MA in American Studies and Ethnicity, University of Southern California (2023)
MA, English Literature, Loyola Marymount University (2018)
BA Honours, English Literature and Classics, University of Toronto (2007)

Biography

My research is focused on examining transpacific Cold War dissent, racialization, and political economy through diasporic Asian North American visual cultures. I was born in Hong Kong and grew up in Markham, making up part of the earliest influx of South/East Asian immigrants into the region. My research thus traces the same circuits of transit and circulation that inform my own relationship to the transpacific space.

My first book project “New Cold War Visuality: U.S., China, and Hong Kong Entanglement in the Cold War Transpacific” engages with today’s so-called “New Cold War” by historicizing the development of capitalist integration between the West and China, as facilitated through non-sovereign regions such as Hong Kong. The book does so by exploring two competing visual cultures: first, a capitalist visual regime expressed through infrastructural objects that reproduce notions of racial and national difference, which I call “New Cold War visuality.” Second, I look to art practice by Asian diasporic art practice that engages New Cold War visuality from below through expressions of non-sovereign experience under global capital. I make the claim that these non-sovereign art practices can help to build cross-racial coalitional politics by highlighting (non-commensurable) commonalities of exploitation across proletarianized and dispossessed groups.

My research is inseparable from my public-facing political activity including writing, editing, and organizing with Lausan Collective (www.lausancollective.com). We are an Asian/diasporic group interested in building internationalist leftist solidarity between Hong Kong, other radical Asian movements, and their diasporas. I am also concurrently a postdoctoral associate in transnational Asian Studies at Tulane University in New Orleans. As a Torontonian who lived in Los Angeles for a decade, I am excited to now have the opportunity to actively engage in Vancouver’s local academic and organizing milieus.

Scholarly Publications

• “A Ubiquity Made Visible”: Non-Sovereign Visuality, Plastic Flowers, and Labor in Cold War Hong Kong,” Amerasia Journal, eds. Crystal Mun-Hye Baik and Wendy Cheng. January 4, 2022.
• Reorienting Resistance in Hong Kong: Leftism, Decoloniality, and Internationalism. eds. Wen Liu, JN Chien, Christina Chung, Ellie Tse. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. [as JN Chien]
• “‘The Hong Kong Card’: Against the New Cold War,” Reorienting Resistance in Hong Kong: Leftism, Decoloniality, and Internationalism. eds. Wen Liu, JN Chien, Christina Chung, Ellie Tse. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. [as JN Chien]
• Chien, JN, Christina Chung, Ellie Tse, Wen Liu, “Editors’ response to book review by Dr. Gina Tam of Reorienting Hong Kong’s Resistance,” The PRC History Review. October 2022. [as JN Chien]
• “Shyam Selvadurai” (encyclopedia entry). Asian American Literature: An Encyclopedia for Students. Westport, CT: ABC-CLIO/Greenwood. August 2021.
• Review of Boys’ Love, Cosplay, and Androgynous Idols: Queer Fan Cultures in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, eds. Jing Jamie Zhao, Ling Yang, and Maud Lavin, Hong Kong Studies 1(2). September 2018.

Publications in the Popular Press

• “Articulating the struggle against both U.S. and China’s Imperialisms.” The Funambulist. Issue 39, January 2022. [as JN]
• “Why the New National Security Laws in Hong Kong Matter.” Jacobin. June 4, 2020. [as JN]
• “Discrimination Isn’t Helping to Contain the Coronavirus.” The Nation. February 7, 2020. [as JN]
• “The Hong Kong Card: Against the New Cold War,” The Abusable Past (Radical History Review). October 23, 2019.
• “Hong Kong’s Mask Ban is Just Cover for a Police Crackdown.” The Nation. October 4, 2019. [as JN]