Time: October 9th, 2025
Speaker: Henrietta Harrison (University of Oxford)
Title: Popular Songs of the 1949 Revolution
Abstract:
What songs were popular in China as the Chinese Communist Party came to power and what can we learn from them about attitudes to the revolution? This talk is research in progress on the songs most frequently published in mandarin songbooks in 1949, including Communist propaganda songs, adapted folksongs, and those performed by the stars of Shanghai commercial music. The examples range from ‘The East is Red’ 东方红, through the adapted Xinjiang folksong ‘Shalihongba Hey!’ 沙里洪巴哀, to the new Boogie Woogie dance song ‘Don’t Go So Fast 别走的那么快’.
Speaker bio:
Henrietta Harrison is Professor of Modern Chinese History in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oxford and Stanley Ho Tutorial Fellow in Chinese History at Pembroke College. She is a Fellow of British Academy. Before Oxford she taught in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Leeds, and in the Department of History at Harvard University. Her books include The Perils of Interpreting: The Extraordinary Lives of Two Translators between Qing China and the British Empire (Princeton University Press, 2021) which won the Kenshur Prize in Eighteenth Century Studies and was shortlisted for the Cundill and Wolfson prizes, The Man Awakened from Dreams: One Man’s Life in a North China Village 1857-1942 (Stanford University Press, 2005) and The Missionary’s Curse and Other Tales from a Chinese Catholic Village (University of California Press, 2013).
