Dr. Zhongping Chen Book Launch

Zhongping Chen is a professor of Chinese history and the history of the global Chinese diaspora at the University of Victoria. His publications include four books, two co-edited bibliographies, more than sixty journal articles in English and Chinese, as well as works on two websites, Victoria’s Chinatown: A Gateway to the Past and Present of Chinese Canadians and the Chinese Canadian Artifacts Project. He has just finished a new book manuscript, “The Transpacific Chinese Diaspora in Canada: From Origins to Rise and Reform, 1788-1898. “

Transpacific Reform and Revolution: The Chinese in North America, 1898−1918 (Stanford University Press) focuses on Chinese political history in Victoria, Vancouver, and other cities along the Pacific coast of North America. It shows how Chinese migrants broke through racist barriers to identify themselves with Canadian constitutional monarchism, American republicanism, and other Western political cultures in the reformist and revolutionary fights for a modern China. In particular, it details how Kang Youwei, a leader of the first but failed political reform in modern China in 1898, came to Victoria the next year and started an overseas Chinese political movement for reform of both China and Chinatowns. It also describes how Sun Yat-sen, the father of Republican China, won strong support first from Chinese Freemasons in Victoria and Vancouver and then from most migrants in North American Chinatowns in his revolutionary movement for the Republic of China from around 1911 to 1918. Moreover, this book uncovers previously untold stories of historic events in Canadian and American histories, such as the first Chinese women’s political association that started from Victoria in 1903 and spread to ten Canadian and American cities by 1905, as well as the interrelated political assassinations in San Francisco’s Chinatown in 1915 and in Victoria’s Chinatown in 1918.