The Contested Meaning of Symbolic Spaces in Bangkok, Hong Kong, and Shanghai

This roundtable moderated by Robert Weller will bring together discussion of the parks, squares, monuments, and other symbolically important parts of three urban centers. The participants will discuss notable struggles to define the meaning and control the use of key spots within the metropolis they know best. The discussion will move from Bangkok and Hong Kong, where Netiwit Chotiphatphaisal and Hana Meihan Davis spent their formative years, to Shanghai, the city that Jeffrey Wasserstrom began his career studying. Netiwit Chotiphatphaisal is an author, activist, translator, founder of a publishing house, and the co-producer of The Last Breath of Sam Yan, a documentary film about a Bangkok shrine that won a major prize in Thailand. He has just begun a graduate program at the Harvard Divinity School. Hana Meihan Davis is the author of For the Love of Hong Kong: A Memoir from my City Under Siege, which was published in 2021. A graduate of Yale and a past editorial intern at and contributor to the Washington Post and the South China Morning Post, she is currently in graduate school at MIT pursuing a master’s in architecture. Jeffrey Wasserstrom is a Distinguished Professor of History at UC Irvine. His books include Global Shanghai,1850-2010, which came out in 2009, and The Milk Tea Alliance: Inside Asia’s Struggle Against Autocracy and Beijing, which was published earlier this year. Robert Weller is a Professor of Anthropology at Boston University. His books include, as author, Resistance, Chaos and Control in China: Taiping Rebels, Taiwanese Ghosts and Tiananmen, which was published in 1994, and, as co-editor, It Happens Among People: Resonances and Extensions of the Work of Fredrik Barth, which came out in 2020.