Professor of Chinese & Asian Studies and Chair of Modern Languages & Literatures Megan Ferry, Trevor Atkins ’20, Jeremy Rausch ’21, and Meghan Reilly ’20 have been awarded an ASIANetwork Freeman Student-Faculty Fellows grant for their project, “Between State and Populace, Chasing the China Dream.”

The fellowship will support the Project Team’s three-week trip to Beijing, Shanghai, and surrounding canal towns and villages to investigate the relationship between government and popular conceptions of the China Dream. The Project Team will investigate how well the media messaging of the China Dream is reaching the population and to what extent these messages have become “common sense.” The Team will conduct interview surveys with citizens across a broad spectrum of class and education differences to measure the media messages against individual aspirations.

The idea for this project stems from the unprecedented series of global events in the last three years indicating a remarkable stake in a nation’s identity and political authority. Brexit, Catalan, Blue States vs. Red States, anti-immigrant marches and laws in the European Union, and mass deportation of undocumented workers in the U.S. are all fissures that represent a rift in the nation-state narrative.