Jing passed away

 Jing Wang, the S.C. Fang Professor of Chinese Languages and Culture, and a longtime member of the MIT faculty in Global Studies and Languages and Comparative Media Studies/Writing, passed away on Sunday in Boston after a heart attack.

For decades, Wang was a leading scholar of the intersection of media and activism in China. Following a bachelor’s degree at National Taiwan University, she studied comparative literature at the University of Michigan and then at the University of Massachusetts, where she earned her PhD.

 She continued her focus on literature at Duke University, where she was faculty for 16 years and authored her first books. 1992’s The Story of Stone, which was awarded a Joseph Levenson Book Prize for the year’s best book on premodern China, explored traditional Chinese literature, but her next book, High Culture Fever: Politics, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Deng’s China (1996), marked a move toward her study of Chinese media more broadly.

Her subsequent work, both as a scholar and nonprofit leader, sought ways to empower Chinese grassroots organizations, particularly within the context of digital and social media literacy. Though she perhaps became best known for her 2009 book Brand New China on advertising and Chinese commercial culture, she was also at the time writing and presenting about a new project, the nonprofit NGO2.0. She and China-based collaborators launched it to help local organizers use social media to be change agents in a country where social media is often held suspect. “She was my esteemed mentor and also great friend,” says Rongting Zhou, a professor at China’s University of Science and Technology who came to MIT as a visiting scholar in 2007 and later helped Wang develop NGO2.0. “She and I overcame many difficulties and made remarkable achievements in China.”