Winners of 2023/24 Ko Cheuk-hung Prizes announced!
Thảo Nguyễn and Shancheng Liu have been awarded the Ko Cheuk-hung Prizes for 2023/24.
Thảo’s thesis, entitled ‘Modern Bodies, Cosmopolitan Minds: Marketing Transregional Medicine in Early Twentieth-Century Colonial Vietnam and Hong Kong’, was awarded the Ko Cheuk-hung Prize for the best MPhil thesis in Modern Chinese Studies.
This thesis is a close examination of the transregional identity that pharmaceutical business Nhị Thiên Đường 二天堂 had adopted and constructed for itself and its consumers against the backdrop of modernising urban hubs in early-twentieth century Vietnam, Hong Kong, and coastal China.
Thảo plans to further research movements of people, products, and perceptions across borders in East and Southeast Asian history.
Shancheng's thesis, entitled ‘Nowhere at Home: The Making of a Chinese Queer Diaspora’, was awarded the Ko Cheuk-hung Prize for the best MSc thesis in Contemporary Chinese Studies.
In this thesis, Shancheng employed autoethnography to critically analyse his journey of transnational (im)mobility as a queer Chinese student studying in the UK. This analysis is situated within the contexts of "mediascapes," China's reintroduction of heteronormative traditional values, global queer liberalism, and the COVID-19 pandemic, calling for a diasporic lens to study the embodied experience of displacement—both physical and sociocultural—of queer Chinese students studying in the West. His research interests span feminism, queer studies, gender and sexuality, nationalism, postcolonialism, migration and diaspora studies, as well as Chinese politics and society. Now applying to PhD programmes globally, Shancheng proposes to investigate the rationales, mechanisms, and consequences of the reconciliation between nationalism and feminism/LGBTQ advocacy in China through the case of "pink feminists" and "pink gays" in his future academic endeavours.
The CCSP congratulates Thảo and Shancheng on their achievement!
