Hsiung Ping-Chen

Childhood becomes a social, spiritual and historical journey for Ping-chen Hsiung, History professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, who has dedicated most of her 40-year-spanning academic career to the study of infants and children in ancient China.

As the West has continually seen childhood as just the first steps taken into the richer and wider phases of life, Hsiung’s studies focus on the spiritual and social roles of the child we all were once, and how the maintenance of this role represents a key to understanding the role we take on as adults.

As well as her position as a History Professor, Hsiung’s takes the seat as the Director of the Center for Taiwan studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and her broad academic experience and research on childhood and infancy in China can be found surmised in her book A Tender Voyage, where she exposes through an interdisciplinary approach the comparisons standing between how we view children in the West, and how they were seen in China hundreds of years ago, in order to extract, from a view of the past in contrast to the present, the path to a more tender future.