What is the primary focus of the 10th World Conference of Chinese Studies (WACS 10) 2026?

The conference provides a platform for scholars to discuss various aspects of Chinese studies, covering its history, culture, politics, and economy, in an international format.

10th World Conference of Chinese Studies (WACS 10) 2026

Name: 10th World Conference of Chinese Studies (WACS 10) 2026
Start: 2026-08-12T00:00:00Z
End: 2026-08-14T00:00:00Z
Location: Hong Kong

Aug 12–14, 2026Hong Kong, ChinaIn-person

Starts in 4 daysRegistration open

The 10th World Conference of Chinese Studies (WACS 10) 2026 is scheduled to take place in Hong Kong, China. This conference serves as a key international forum for scholars and researchers dedicated to the study of China, fostering academic exchange and collaboration across various disciplines related to Chinese civilization, history, culture, politics, and economy. The event aims to bring together diverse perspectives on contemporary and historical issues concerning China.

Committees & topics

Topics
Classical Studies in the Sinological Tradition · Contemporary Challenges in China Studies · Chinese Literature: Tradition, Modernity, and Global Circulation · Chinese History: Periodization, Sources, and Interpretation · Chinese Philosophy: From the Hundred Schools to Contemporary Thought · The Chinese Economy: Reform, Slowdown, and Global Linkages · Technology in and from China: Innovation, Controls, and Governance · Chinese Classical Fiction: The Vernacular Novel and Its Afterlives

Why it matters

This conference is significant as it provides a dedicated space for in-depth academic discourse on CHN, a country with profound global influence. The discussions and research presented at WACS 10 2026 will contribute to a more nuanced understanding of CHN's evolving role in international affairs, its internal dynamics, and its cultural heritage. Such gatherings are vital for shaping informed policy decisions and fostering cross-cultural understanding.

For diplomats and policymakers, the insights gleaned from this conference can be instrumental in developing effective engagement strategies with CHN. Understanding the academic consensus and ongoing research trends in Chinese studies can help anticipate future developments and identify potential areas for cooperation or contention. The interdisciplinary nature of the conference ensures a holistic view of CHN, moving beyond singular political or economic lenses.

How to prepare

To effectively engage with the discussions at WACS 10 2026, participants should undertake thorough preparation focusing on the latest research in their respective fields of Chinese studies. Familiarity with current geopolitical trends affecting CHN, particularly those emanating from its immediate region and major global powers, will enhance the ability to contribute meaningfully to the dialogue. Given the conference's location in Hong Kong, CHN, understanding the unique historical and political context of this city within the broader framework of CHN studies is also crucial.

Delegates should consider conducting a stakeholder mapping exercise prior to the conference to identify key academics, institutions, and research areas that align with their interests. This will facilitate targeted networking and collaboration opportunities. Furthermore, preparing to engage with diverse viewpoints, including those that may challenge conventional understandings, is essential for a productive and intellectually stimulating experience. The conference offers a prime opportunity for dynamic analysis of emerging trends in Chinese scholarship.

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 2 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

China

As the host nation, CHN's academic institutions and scholars will likely present research reflecting domestic priorities and interpretations of Chinese history and contemporary issues.

Role in topic

CHN is the central subject of the conference, with its historical, cultural, political, and economic developments forming the core of all discussions. Scholars from CHN will offer direct insights into internal perspectives and research directions.

HKG

Hong Kong, as the conference city, provides a unique vantage point for Chinese studies, blending influences from both mainland CHN and international academic traditions.

Role in topic

The location in Hong Kong, CHN, offers a distinct academic environment that has historically served as a bridge between Western and Chinese scholarship. Local institutions and scholars will contribute perspectives shaped by Hong Kong's specific socio-political context.

Topics & background

The background behind each topic and the actors that shape it.

Classical Studies in the Sinological Tradition

Classical Chinese Studies, or guoxue, traces its modern institutional roots to the late Qing and Republican eras, when scholars such as Zhang Taiyan, Wang Guowei, and Hu Shi sought to reconcile the canonical Confucian corpus with Western philological methods. The discipline encompasses the study of the Five Classics, the Thirteen Classics, paleography on oracle bones and bronzes, and the textual traditions transmitted through dynastic commentary. After 1949, classical scholarship was reorganized in the PRC under new ideological frames, while Taiwan, Hong Kong, and overseas centers in Kyoto, Princeton, and Paris preserved alternative lineages of inquiry. The contemporary field has been transformed by archaeological discoveries, including the Guodian and Tsinghua bamboo slips, which have forced reassessment of received texts on the Laozi, the Book of Changes, and early Confucian thought. Digital humanities tools, large textual corpora such as CTEXT and Kanseki Repository, and renewed state investment in traditional culture under Xi Jinping's promotion of 'fine traditional Chinese culture' have raised both opportunities and methodological debates. Core disputes today concern the authenticity of unprovenanced manuscripts, the relationship between guoxue revival and state ideology, and the place of non-Han classical traditions within the field.

Key players

Contemporary Challenges in China Studies

China studies as a field has been buffeted by the deterioration of access conditions inside the PRC since the mid-2010s. The 2017 Foreign NGO Law, tightening visa regimes, restrictions on archival access, and the 2023 revisions to the Counter-Espionage Law have constrained foreign fieldwork, surveys, and even routine data collection. Simultaneously, U.S.-China strategic competition has produced reciprocal scrutiny of academic exchange, the closure of most Confucius Institutes in North America and Europe, and the winding down of the U.S. Fulbright program in China and Hong Kong in 2020. These pressures coincide with an expansion of Chinese-funded scholarship abroad and a growing methodological divide between China-based and overseas researchers. Debates center on research ethics under authoritarian conditions, the security of Chinese collaborators, self-censorship, and whether the field should pivot toward Hong Kong, Taiwan, and diaspora communities as proxy sites. Contemporary challenges also include the analysis of Xinjiang, Tibet, and Hong Kong policy, demographic decline, the post-zero-COVID economy, and the implications of deepening Sino-Russian alignment for the discipline's regional framing.

Key players

Chinese Literature: Tradition, Modernity, and Global Circulation

Chinese literary studies span three millennia of writing, from the Shijing and Chuci through Tang and Song poetry, Ming-Qing vernacular fiction, and the May Fourth modernist rupture led by Lu Xun, Mao Dun, and Ding Ling. The post-1949 division between PRC socialist realism, Taiwan modernism, Hong Kong popular fiction, and Sinophone writing in Southeast Asia and North America produced parallel canons that scholars such as David Der-wei Wang and Shu-mei Shih have sought to integrate under frameworks like 'Sinophone literature' and 'worlding' Chinese letters. Today the field grapples with the global reception of authors including Mo Yan, Yan Lianke, Yu Hua, and the science fiction of Liu Cixin and Hao Jingfang, whose international success has reshaped translation markets and the politics of representation. Web literature, with platforms hosting tens of millions of readers, has produced new genres, IP economies, and censorship regimes. Core scholarly disputes include the boundaries of 'Chinese' versus 'Sinophone,' the political economy of translation, the place of ethnic minority and women's writing, and how to read literature produced under tightening ideological constraints since 2012.

Key players

Chinese History: Periodization, Sources, and Interpretation

The historiography of China has shifted dramatically since the late twentieth century. The 'New Qing History' associated with Evelyn Rawski, Mark Elliott, and Pamela Crossley reframed the Qing as a multi-ethnic Inner Asian empire rather than a straightforward Chinese dynasty, provoking sharp pushback from PRC historians who view such framings as politically motivated. Parallel revisions have reshaped understanding of the Song economic revolution, Ming maritime activity, and the Republican era, while the opening and partial reclosing of archives in Beijing, Nanjing, and Taipei has driven cycles of historiographical change. Current debates concern the periodization of modern China, the legacy of the Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward in light of restricted local archives, the historiography of the Sino-Japanese War, and the politics of national history education. The Xia-Shang-Zhou Chronology Project and successor state-led initiatives have linked archaeology to claims about the antiquity of Chinese civilization, while overseas scholars contest both methods and conclusions. Questions of how to write the history of Xinjiang, Tibet, Mongolia, and Taiwan within or outside a 'China' frame remain among the most contested in the field.

Key players

Chinese Philosophy: From the Hundred Schools to Contemporary Thought

Chinese philosophy as an academic category emerged in the early twentieth century through engagement with Western disciplinary models, notably in the works of Hu Shi and Feng Youlan. The corpus stretches from the Warring States Hundred Schools — Confucian, Daoist, Mohist, Legalist, and Logician traditions — through Han syncretism, Wei-Jin xuanxue, the Buddhist-Confucian encounter, and the Neo-Confucian syntheses of Zhu Xi and Wang Yangming. Twentieth-century New Confucians including Mou Zongsan, Tang Junyi, and Tu Weiming sought to defend the tradition's relevance against Marxism and liberalism alike. Contemporary debates revolve around comparative philosophy and the legitimacy of 'Chinese philosophy' as a category, the resurgence of political Confucianism in thinkers like Jiang Qing and Bei Tongdong, and the use of classical thought in PRC official discourse on governance and international order. The Guodian and Mawangdui manuscript discoveries continue to reshape understanding of early Daoism and Confucianism. Scholars also debate how Chinese ethical frameworks bear on global questions in bioethics, environmental philosophy, and AI ethics, where 'tianxia' and relational ethics have been advanced as alternatives to liberal universalism.

Key players

The Chinese Economy: Reform, Slowdown, and Global Linkages

China's post-1978 reform and opening transformed it from a low-income planned economy into the world's second-largest economy and largest trading nation. Successive phases — household responsibility reforms, township and village enterprises, WTO accession in 2001, and the post-2008 stimulus — produced extraordinary growth but also entrenched local government debt, real estate dependence, and structural imbalances. Since 2015, slowing productivity growth, demographic decline, and the rebalancing toward 'high-quality development' under Xi Jinping have defined the policy agenda. The field of China economic studies now confronts the property sector crisis triggered by Evergrande and Country Garden, deflationary pressures, youth unemployment, and the implications of industrial policy initiatives such as Made in China 2025 and the 'new productive forces' framework. External shocks include U.S. and EU tariffs and export controls on semiconductors, the contested narrative of overcapacity in EVs and solar, and the partial decoupling of supply chains. Scholarly debates center on the reliability of official statistics, the sustainability of the current growth model, the consequences of demographic decline, and whether China is heading for a Japan-style stagnation or a different trajectory.

Key players

Technology in and from China: Innovation, Controls, and Governance

China's technology trajectory has moved from manufacturing assembly to indigenous innovation in telecommunications, high-speed rail, EVs, batteries, solar, and increasingly artificial intelligence and semiconductors. Firms such as Huawei, BYD, CATL, ByteDance, and DeepSeek have become global competitors, while state programs including the Integrated Circuit 'Big Fund,' the New Generation AI Development Plan (2017), and the 'whole-nation system' for chips channel substantial public investment into strategic sectors. The PRC has also built one of the world's most extensive regimes of platform regulation and data governance, including the Cybersecurity Law (2017), Data Security Law (2021), and PIPL (2021). The field's central tensions today involve U.S. export controls on advanced semiconductors and lithography tools imposed since October 2022, allied controls by the Netherlands and Japan, and Chinese countermeasures on gallium, germanium, and graphite. Scholars examine how sanctions are reshaping global value chains, whether China can achieve self-sufficiency in chips, and how Chinese AI governance — including the 2023 Generative AI Measures — compares with the EU AI Act and U.S. approaches. Surveillance technology, TikTok regulation abroad, and standards competition in bodies such as the ITU round out the agenda.

Key players

Chinese Classical Fiction: The Vernacular Novel and Its Afterlives

Chinese classical fiction crystallized in the Ming and Qing dynasties around the so-called Four Great Classical Novels — Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Water Margin, Journey to the West, and Dream of the Red Chamber — together with the erotic Jin Ping Mei and the satirical Rulin Waishi and Liaozhai Zhiyi. Growing out of Song and Yuan storytelling traditions (huaben) and historical romance, the vernacular novel matured in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as commercial publishing expanded in Jiangnan. The genre was reappraised in the May Fourth period when Hu Shi and Lu Xun elevated baihua fiction as a foundation for modern national literature. Contemporary scholarship, advanced by figures such as Andrew Plaks, David Rolston, and Shang Wei, addresses commentarial traditions, textual recensions, gender and the body, and the relationship between fiction and historiography. Redology — the dedicated study of Honglou meng — remains a vast subfield with active disputes over authorship, manuscript lineages, and the unfinished latter chapters. The classical novels also enjoy a vigorous afterlife in film, television, animation, and games such as Black Myth: Wukong, raising new questions about adaptation, soft power, and the global circulation of premodern Chinese narrative.

Key players

Resources

News, lessons, and country profiles to prep for 10th World Conference of Chinese Studies (WACS 10) 2026.

Recent reporting to ground your prep

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Lessons

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Hidden Stakeholders

Engagement Strategies

Dynamic Analysis

Stakeholder Mapping Workshop

Courses

Guided courses that go deeper on the topic

Advanced Negotiation

Multilateral Negotiation

Policy Brief Writing

Conflict Resolution

The states in play, with the data that shapes their stance

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Country dossier

By committee

Frequently asked questions

10th World Conference of Chinese Studies (WACS 10) 2026

Aug 12–14, 2026Hong Kong, ChinaIn-person

Starts in 4 daysRegistration open

Committees & topics

Topics
Classical Studies in the Sinological Tradition · Contemporary Challenges in China Studies · Chinese Literature: Tradition, Modernity, and Global Circulation · Chinese History: Periodization, Sources, and Interpretation · Chinese Philosophy: From the Hundred Schools to Contemporary Thought · The Chinese Economy: Reform, Slowdown, and Global Linkages · Technology in and from China: Innovation, Controls, and Governance · Chinese Classical Fiction: The Vernacular Novel and Its Afterlives

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 2 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

China

As the host nation, CHN's academic institutions and scholars will likely present research reflecting domestic priorities and interpretations of Chinese history and contemporary issues.

Role in topic

HKG

Hong Kong, as the conference city, provides a unique vantage point for Chinese studies, blending influences from both mainland CHN and international academic traditions.

Role in topic

Topics & background

The background behind each topic and the actors that shape it.

Classical Studies in the Sinological Tradition

Key players

Contemporary Challenges in China Studies

Key players

Chinese Literature: Tradition, Modernity, and Global Circulation

Key players

Chinese History: Periodization, Sources, and Interpretation

Key players

Chinese Philosophy: From the Hundred Schools to Contemporary Thought

Key players

The Chinese Economy: Reform, Slowdown, and Global Linkages

Key players

Technology in and from China: Innovation, Controls, and Governance

Key players

Chinese Classical Fiction: The Vernacular Novel and Its Afterlives

Key players

Resources

News, lessons, and country profiles to prep for 10th World Conference of Chinese Studies (WACS 10) 2026.

Recent reporting to ground your prep

Federal Court Blocks Trump's Asylum Rules

UAE's AI Dominance Widens Gap With India

White House Proposes New Frontier AI Controls

Trump's AI Order Delay Reveals White House Rr

Lessons

Bite-sized lessons to build the basics

Hidden Stakeholders

Engagement Strategies

Dynamic Analysis

Stakeholder Mapping Workshop

Courses

Guided courses that go deeper on the topic

Advanced Negotiation

Multilateral Negotiation

Policy Brief Writing

Conflict Resolution

The states in play, with the data that shapes their stance

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

By committee

Committees & topics

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Topics & background

Resources

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Frequently asked questions

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How to prepare

Country perspectives

Topics & background

Resources

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Frequently asked questions