10th Enemy Encounters Webinar “Rumours and 19th-20th Century Religious Resistance, State Repression and Maoist Campaigns in China”

Please see below for information about the tenth session of the 2024-2025 Enemy Encounters in East Asia webinar series of the Research Training Group “Ambivalent Enmity: Dynamics of Antagonism in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East” at Heidelberg University and the Heidelberg University of Jewish Studies, Germany.

“Rumours: Their Overlooked Role in the Build-Up to Religious Resistance, State Repression and Maoist Campaigns in late Imperial and Twentieth-Century China”

Barend ter Haar 
(Professor Emeritus, Hamburg University)

• July 3, 2025, 4:00 PM (Heidelberg, CEST) via ZOOM. 
• The webinar will not be recorded.
• If you would like to attend the webinars, please contact barend.noordam[at]hcts.uni-heidelberg.de. 

In this session, Barend ter Haar (Professor Emeritus, Hamburg University) will share his thoughts on the role of rumours in the build up to religious resistance and state repression in late imperial and twentieth-century China:

Rumours have a bad reputation, but are really little else than news that has been repudiated retrospectively. Thus, rumours always also involve power relationships, since it is those with power who decide which news is deemed a rumour and which is not. Of course, some news is fake after all, but by no means all fake news is labelled as a rumour. The second characteristic of this type of news is that it spread quickly, historically always orally like any other news, but since the rise of writing (of which social media are only the most recent instantiation) also through other media. Before news becomes dismissed as rumours, they can be extremely influential. Yet, after their relabelling from news to rumours, little attention is paid to this category of information, despite its impact on society. IN this talk I will discuss Chinese historical rumours and the way in which they influenced historical events, but also how misunderstandings about the nature of news as rumours has bedazzled both contemporary political systems (from imperial China to the modern age) as well as modern historians. Some of the examples will come from my earlier published research, others from my re-interpretation of important late imperial so-called “religiously” inspired “rebellions”. The quotation marks will be explained during the talk.

BACKGROUND

For more information about the Research Training Group “Ambivalent Enmity: Dynamics of Antagonism in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East”, please go to our website  https://ambivalentenmity.org/.      

This project has received funding from the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG).