OU event: Distinguished Speaker Series - Prof Gu Yueguo on Chinese Face over centenaries

Please join us for the second talk in our Distinguished Speaker Series from Professor Gu Yueguo from Beijing Foreign Studies University.

Professor Gu will explore issues around the concept of “face” in China and the high importance of “saving face” to preserve a person’s respect and honour. The Chinese native anthropologist Lin Yutang characterizes “face” as one of ‘three immutable laws of the Chinese universe’.

With this in mind, Professor Gu will attempt to explore three issues in this talk:

1. Has the concept of face, the Chinese twins --- ‘mianzi’ and ‘lian’ --- evolved in China over the last two centuries?
2. Is it still alive and kicking at the first phase of the 21st century China?; and
3. Is it relevant to business transactions in Chinese business sectors?

This talk will be followed by a short talk from Dr Kan Qian, Associate Head of School for Learning and Teaching in the School of Languages and Applied Linguistics at The Open University. Dr Kan will introduce the new short course, Chinese Business Culture Essentials and how an understanding of the much broader context of Chinese culture, and the values which permeate Chinese business, is needed to build positive, long-term business relationships.

This event will be recorded and available after the event.

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Presenter: Professor Gu Yueguo

Professor Gu has been a pioneer in China’s research in artificial intelligence, corpus linguistics and online education, just to mention a few. He is now the chief scientist in one of China’s major centres in Artificial Intelligence and Human Language Research. He is the Director of China’s Multilingual Multimodal Corpora & Big Data Research Centre (Beijing Foreign Studies University) and Director of Aging, Language and Care Research Centre (Tongji University).

Professor Gu also has interests in Chinese painting, Chinese language, as well as the dynamics of power at workplaces (e.g. Chinese officialdom (Guan) at work in discourse, 2002, Longman).

His latest publications include The Routledge Handbook of Pragmatics (co-edited), The Encyclopedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics (co-edited, Brill), Chinese Painting (FLTRP), Chinese Writing: a window to Chinese civilization and culture (FLTRP), and Gerontolinguistics and Multimodality Studies (Tongji University Press).