Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

A survey of the history of China from the end of the eighteenth century to the present. Breadth-Humanities.

COURSE DETAILS:

From the famed cities of Beijing and Shanghai to the western borderlands of Xinjiang and Tibet, the areas that fall within present-day China’s borders have undergone tumultuous changes over the past two centuries. A series of wars and rebellions ranging from the Opium Wars to the Chinese Civil War overturned existing orders and created hundreds of thousands, even millions of casualties and refugees. The People’s Republic of China was established in 1949, and has gone through periods of change, trauma, and reform.

We will study two centuries of Chinese history in local, national, and global contexts. Themes and topics include the mid-19^th century crisis, imperialism, emergence of national political parties, Japanese occupation, Cultural Revolution, industrialization, labor, the reform period, Tiananmen protests of 1989, globalization, the question of minorities and borderlands, and more.

Upon successful completion of the course, students should have (1) gained an appreciation of the magnitude of the problems facing people in China during the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries; (2) begun to develop an understanding of China as a diverse and dynamic society that has interacted with the rest of the world; (3) improved their ability to critically analyze important historical moments and debates based on concrete evidence; (4) developed sensibility and ability to draw connections between the past and present; (5) learned to read and evaluate primary and secondary sources.

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING:

REQUIRED READING NOTES: