From June 15 to 17, 2023, Heidelberg University hosted the Joint Center’s Annual Conference. The event brought together project members and fellows from all sites involved in the Joint Center as well as other invited scholars around the theme “The Making of Epochal Events: Narrating Turning Points in Chinese History”. The event engaged with the question in how far events are “epochal”, whether they necessarily mark a break with the past, thus promising the dawning of a new epoch, a “new reality” (Simon), or whether the “epochal” can also be constructed to make a claim of historical discontinuity that might be quite at odds with the experiences of the actors involved. Read the report