6TH EDITION ★ MARCH 2025 ★ GHENT
CHINESE (UN)TRUTHS & POETRY
Made in China Festival & China Platform Ghent University & Poëziecentrum Gent
join forces and invite you to a special evening filled with
Chinese (Un)Truths & Poetry!
AULA GENT - VOLDERSTRAAT 9
Pascal Coppens presents his challenging new book Can we Trust China?
interviewed by China expert Tom Van de Weghe.
Poet Wang Jiaxin will talk with Asia expert
Veerle De Vos about his poetry collection in Dutch translation Een Asgrauwe Dageraad (Poëziecentrum) in presence of editor and translator Silvia Marijnissen.
CAN WE TRUST CHINA?
A Different View on a Country in Transition.
By 2030, China will be the largest economy in the world. How is it that the country is overtaking the West in lots of areas? Does China have the wealthy West to thank for this? Or is it the result of a decisive collective society? Do the Chinese play by the rules? And what do the Chinese themselves think of the Party and the system?
In the search for answers to these questions, opinions quickly get heated, and people often take a very firm position in either the positive or negative camp. This could end up costing us. Instead of infecting the ‘China Narrative’ with cause-and-effect reasoning and good-versus-bad views on the Chinese, we need to step into their own circles of trust to unveil a different logic.
Can We Trust China? provides a diverse answer to the many questions about China that make us wary. The book delves into the Chinese psyche to go beyond assumptions and stereotypes and to find out what makes a Chinese person tick, how they fit into society, and how they run their business and the country. The book helps better understand the China of tomorrow, as well as our own future. The magic of trusting China gets unveiled by viewing both the Chinese and the Western models from the perspective of how ‘network-circles’ of trust and ‘system-circles’ of trust are built around people and the collective.
In Een asgrauwe dageraad Wang Jiaxin unfolds his vision on the relationship of the individual to society, history, fate, humanity, using his own, calm style. In the shadows of past and present he searches for truths, large and small, from direct experience. Although his poems often play in winter, at night or in the dark, Wang Jiaxin still sees the sun on the other side. Or does he always stand in a dawn, but one that is not always rosy?
​
This overview collection of Wang Jiaxin's work was edited by Silvia Marijnissen (1970), translator of Chinese literature, including novels by Mo Yan and Chang Eileen, of modern poetry by Jidi Majia, Yang Mu, Ye Mimi, Hsia Yu, Shang Ch'in, Duoduo and Chen Li and of classical landscape poetry.