From November 21 to 23, the 2025 Wang Meng Academic Events were held at Ocean University of China (OUC). More than 200 faculty members and students attended the events.
On November 22, the 20th Wang Meng Academic Seminar and the 2025 Youth Forum on Wang Meng’s New Works were held. In his remarks, the renowned artist and former Minister of Culture, Wang Meng, said that although he is over 90 years old, his passion for writing remains strong. This stems from his deep love for the Chinese language, for literature, and also for life itself. He elaborated on the dialectical relationship between “extreme thinking” in literary creation and the “golden mean” in daily life, and expressed his hope for broader intergenerational dialogue with young scholars.
In her speech, Zhang Jing, Executive Deputy Secretary of the CPC OUC Committee, noted that since the writing of the novel Long Live Youth in 1953, Wang Meng has kept writing for more than 70 years, producing works amounting to over 20 million Chinese characters that have won the love and respect of readers. Since Wang Meng joined OUC in 2002, he has injected strong impetus into the university’s high-quality development of humanities disciplines with his broad cultural vision and abundant creative achievements. Deputy Secretary Zhang Jing pointed out that research on Wang Meng has become a signature academic brand of the university, and that OUC will continue to support the Wang Meng Academic Seminar, the Research Institute for Wang Meng’s Literature Works, and related research, so that this work will become even more vibrant and prosperous.
More than 40 young scholars engaged in in-depth discussions on Wang Meng’s three new works published in 2025: the short story collection A Collection of Summer, the short story You Passed by Me, and To the Extremes of Liao Zhai: Wang Meng on Liao Zhai.
