Chris Chung
Chris Chung is an Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream, in Chinese history at the University of Toronto. He graduated from his PhD program in History at the University of Toronto in November 2022, which he conducted under the supervision of Professor Li Chen. Using the South China Sea islands dispute as a case study, he investigates how the global flow of ideas and activities of everyday people vitally informed Chinese state conceptions of space and sovereignty in the maritime frontier since the late eighteenth century.
His doctoral dissertation, "Fluid Realms: Chinese Visions of Maritime Space in the South China Sea Islands," explores the pivotal roles that non-government actors across the globe played in Qing and Republican claims-making over the Pratas, Paracel, and Spratly Islands, such as fishers, merchants, and community organizations. Drawing from largely unused Chinese archival files, "Fluid Realms" traces how these non-official actors compelled government adoption of their views by fusing disparate Qing notions of maritime space with incoming Western and Japanese ideas of geography, international law, and the nation-state. Chinese officials, he argues, were regularly forced to negotiate their political worldviews with the non-official narratives they relied on to understand the islands, their place within the emerging nation-state — and indeed, what constituted China itself.
People Type:
Roles:
Research Area:
Late imperial and modern China; history of the South China Sea islands dispute; Chinese maritime history; global and transnational history; borders and frontiers; territoriality and spatiality; nationalism and nation-building; modernity studies; maritime law and sovereignty.
Program:
I am generally interested in how late imperial and modern Chinese notions of territory, history, identity, and the nation intersect and develop in the South China Sea islands dispute. The archipelagos involved are the Pratas, Paracel, and Spratly Islands, as well as Macclesfield Bank.
Specifically, my dissertation examines Chinese conceptions of sovereignty in maritime frontiers as they relate to the disputed South China Sea islands, and how and why these ideas have changed over time, from the Qing dynasty (1644-1912) to the present.
It further explores how various state and non-state actors have contributed to, received, and disturbed national visualizations of the islands, thereby nuancing the production of these narratives in China. These actors can range from fishermen, shipping firms, public and government organizations who forwarded nationalist petitions, geographers and news staff who provided counsel to Chinese governments, to international organizations such as the United Nations.
My research makes extensive use of relevant archival materials located in Taiwan, mainland China, and Hong Kong. These remain virtually unused in current scholarship on the islands dispute.
