Michel Hockx is a professor of Chinese Literature and the Director of the Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies at the University of Notre Dame.

His research focuses on modern and contemporary Chinese literary and cultural communities, their publications, their values, their relationship to the state, and their representation in history. His most recent book publications are Women and the Periodical Press in China’s Long Twentieth Century (co-edited with Joan Judge and Barbara Mittler, Cambridge UP, 2018) and Internet Literature in China (monograph, Columbia, UP, 2015).

In this lecture, Hockx examines the standard narrative of the May Fourth Movement. Hockx will discuss archival materials alongside scholarly narratives from Europe, the PRC, and the USA to reconstruct the process by which Shandong was restored to Chinese sovereignty, and to try and understand why the diplomatic solution to the Shandong Question has failed to make an impact on the May Fourth master narrative.