This is a lecture course focusing on the changing relationship between East Asian countries and the United States in the 20th-century. On the basis of reviewing the early encounters between East Asia and America in the 18th and 19th centuries, this course covers the major political, economic, military, and cultural developments, as well as the dynamics underlying them, that have shaped the confrontation and cooperation between various East Asian countries and the United States in the past 100 years. In particular, this course aims to help students develop a better understanding of how nations with different values, cultural-historical backgrounds, political institutions, and levels of economic development may coexist in today’s world.
This course examines China's modern history from around the 16th century to the present. It will go through the social, political, economic and cultural, as well as international developments China has experienced during the past four hundred years, with an emphasis placed upon the late 19th and 20th centuries. While this course will provide a chronological depiction of main historical events and historical figures, it will also emphasize a series of important themes crucial for comprehending the dynamics and trajectory of China's modern era. Its purpose is not just to impart information; it also aims to cultivate a basic understanding of the significance of the Chinese experience in the age of worldwide modernization. This course will also expose students to different scholarly or other interpretations of China's recent past, so that, hopefully, they will occupy an academically/intellectually informed position to critically embrace or discard all kinds of narratives of “China” and its modern history that they encounter. The format of the course combines lectures, critical discussions, and interactive selected text reading.
The course, combining question-oriented lectures, seminar-style discussions, and interactive reading, examines China’s “prolonged rise” by putting it into the larger context of its 20th-century “going global” experience characterized by crises, wars, revolutions and, finally, unprecedented reforms. The course will highlight the tortuous trajectory of the most important bilateral relations of our age – Chinese-American relations – and how and why it has been profoundly related to China’s going global experience. It will also explore what driving forces and dynamics has generated China’s rise, why it has to be looked upon as a complicated and prolonged process, and what opportunities and challenges it has presented to both China and the 21st-century world, and how they might be dealt with.
This is a reading and research seminar with an emphasis on the “new“ Cold War history – a scholarly phenomenon emerging in the 1990s, along with the end of the global Cold War and the new opportunities to conduct multi-archival and multi-source research for scholars of international history. Students in this class will be exposed to various new interpretations, new methods of research, and new ways of thinking associated with the new Cold War history studies. Readings in this class will be focused on the scholarship that has appeared since the early and mid-1990s. Students are required to write several book reviews and a comprehensive review essay, as well as to present and critique the comprehensive review essay in class. The ultimate purpose of the course is to help students take the Cold War as a useful reference to pursue a better understanding of the challenges facing the human race in the 21st century.
This is a bilingual, multimedia and “language across curriculum” course designed to help students – both native Chinese speakers and non-native speakers with high competence in Chinese – develop the ability of critically reading primary and other sources about or related to modern Chinese history. The course is organized around identifying and answering the following basic questions: What are modern China-related primary sources? How to identify them and where to locate them? And, most important of all, how to critically read and use them? The course will begin with discussions of a series of basic questions concerning "China" and "modern China," which will be followed by a general introduction to a variety of primary sources related to study of modern Chinese history. It will then concentrate on engaging the students in critically reading, thoughtfully interpreting, and skillfully translating historical documents/texts in Chinese language on several important subjects of modern Chinese history. For this purpose, altogether five sets of documents representing different events and historical periods are selected, and the professors and the students will work together to read, translate, annotate, and interpret these documents. While doing so, both historical and linguistic issues will be addressed and analyzed, so that the students will develop a better understanding of how to deal with some of the general challenges that they will be facing in conducting primary-source research on modern China.