Report: Dai Jinhua’s Public Lecture “Ways of Imagining the Self and China”

Heidelberg

June 24, 2025

 

On June 24, 2025, the Heidelberg subproject “Epochal Lifeworlds” hosted a public lecture with Worldmaking fellow Dai Jinhua. Dai Jinhua is a renowned scholar of film, mass media as well as gender studies, and currently Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Peking University and the Director of the Peking University Film and Cultural Studies Center.

This lecture examined how Chinese millennials (born between 1985 and 2005) imagine both the self and the nation within the changing context of “China’s rise” since the late 1970s. The lecture highlighted how different cultural texts including cinema, internet literature and video games serve as symptomatic expressions of the tensions, desires, and vulnerabilities of this generation, while also mediating the psychological formations, lived experiences, and structural conditions that shape young people’s self-perceptions and collective imaginations.

 

Dai Jinhua foregrounded key dynamics such as the impacts of the one-child policy, consumerism and the depoliticization of society. These forces have, she claims, shaped a culture of individualism in China wherefore Chinese millennials are often described as growing up without fully becoming adult, which gives rise to narcissism, nostalgia, melancholia and exhaustion. However, recent cultural texts signal a return of the rebellious energy, long lost but once dominant in socialist China. Iconic figures such as Sun Wukong and Ne Zha that have once been symbols of rebellion or rupture illustrate this change: They now reappear as reluctant heroes, suggesting that after three decades of absence, the question of changing the world has cautiously returned to this generation.

 

The lecture attracted a large student and non-student audience and inspired lively exchanges and discussions.