Course Schedule

This course looks at history of post-1949 China from two different perspectives. Students will read "proper" historical texts: political and intellectual essays, government documents, social reports, and scholarly historical monographs. These will be juxtaposed to different forms of narrative construction: movies, novels, and autobiographical accounts. With this integrated approach, the course examines the history of the People's Republic of China but also the continuous interplay between historiography and politics, history and memory, popular culture and learning.

The People's Republic of China has emerged as the second largest economy in the world and a major player on the global stage, and that has quickly turned it into an object of both admiration and fear, appreciation and vilification. How we view China depends in part on our political leanings, what kind of media we consume, but, most importantly, on what we actually know about the country, its people, and its history. This course explores some of the most important issues concerning today's China and its relationship with the rest of the world, by viewing them in a longer historical perspective and focusing on the complex legacy of the last two hundred years.

While we will adopt a historian's approach, we will read and use works by sociologists, anthropologists, and political scientists. And while the focus of the course is China, the methodology we deploy here can and should be applied to other cases.