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Department of History

Readings

Recommended Textbook

  • R. Keith Schoppa, Revolution and Its Past: Identities and Change in Modern Chinese History, 3rd ed. (Prentice Hall, 2010).

 

Weekly Topics and Readings

 
Autumn Term

  1. UNIT I: QING AND EARLY MODERN EMPIRES

    Introduction (October 6)
    • Seminar A: Introduction
  2. The Qing Dynasty (October 13)
    • R. Keith Schoppa, Revolution and Its Past, chapters 1-2.
    • John K. Fairbank, "Tributary Trade and China's Relations with the West," The Far Eastern Quarterly 1, no. 2 (1941): 129-149.
    • Matthew Mosca, From Frontier Policy to Foreign Policy: The Question of India and the Transformation of Geopolitics in Qing China (Stanford University Press, 2013), chapters 5, 6, and 8. [e-book]
    • Optional: Peter C. Perdue, "The Tenacious Tributary System," Journal of Contemporary China 24, no. 96 (2015): 1002-1014.
    • Seminar B: Strangers from Afar
  3. Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century China (October 20)
    • R. Keith Schoppa, Revolution and Its Past, chapter 3.
    • Lin Zexu, “Moral Advice to Queen Victoria” (1839), in China’s Response to the West: A Documentary Survey, 1893-1923, ed. Ssu-yu Teng and John K. Fairbank (Harvard University Press, 1979 [1954]), 24-28.
    • James Hevia, English Lessons: The Pedagogy of Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century China (Duke University Press, 2003), chapters 1, 4, 5, and 6. [e-book]
    • Seminar C: The Era of Global European Hegemony
  4. Rebellions and Restoration (October 27)
    • R. Keith Schoppa, Revolution and Its Past, chapters 4-5.
    • Benjamin Elman, On Their Own Terms: Science in China, 1550-1900 (Harvard University Press, 2005), chapters 8-10. [e-book]
    • Seminar D: Modern Science and Technology
  5. Late Qing Crisis (November 3)
    • R. Keith Schoppa, Revolution and Its Past, chapters 6-7.
    • Liang Qichao, “The Renovation of the People” (1902), in China’s Response to the West, ed. Teng and Fairbank, 220-223.
    • Frank Dikötter, “Racial Identities in China: Context and Meaning,” The China Quarterly 138 (1994): 404-412.
    • Paul Cohen, History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth (Columbia University Press, 1997), chapters 1-2. [e-book]
    • Optional: Peter Zarrow, “The Rise of Confucian Radicalism,” in China in War and Revolution: 1895-1949 (Routledge, 2005), 12-29.
    • Seminar E: Anti-imperialism
  6. Reading Week (November 10)

  7. UNIT II: VISIONS OF A NEW SOCIETY

    The Founding of China's Republic (November 17)
    • R. Keith Schoppa, Revolution and Its Past, chapter 8.
    • Sun Yat-sen, “The Manifesto of the Tung-Meng-Hui” (1905), in China’s Response to the West, ed. Teng and Fairbank, 227-229.
    • Henrietta Harrison, The Making of the Republican Citizen: Political Ceremonies and Symbols in China, 1911-1929 (Oxford University Press, 2000), chapters 1-2.
    • Dorothy Ko, Cinderella's Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding (University of California Press, 2005), chapters 1-2. [e-book]
    • Seminar F: Empire to Nation
  8. The May Fourth Movement (November 24)
    • R. Keith Schoppa, Revolution and Its Past, chapter 9.
    • Chen Duxiu, “Call to Youth” (1915), in China’s Response to the West, ed. Teng and Fairbank, 240-246.
    • Lu Xun, “Diary of a Madman” (1918), in Diary of a Madman and Other Stories, trans. William A. Lyell (University of Hawaii Press, 1990), 29-41. [e-book]
    • Rana Mitter, A Bitter Revolution: China's Struggle with the Modern World (Oxford University Press, 2004), chapters 2-3. [e-book]
    • Seminar G: Cultural Modernities
  9. The First United Front: 1923-1927 (December 1)
    • Short Essay 1 due at beginning of lecture.
    • R. Keith Schoppa, Revolution and Its Past, chapter 10.
    • Ding Ling, "Miss Sophia's Diary," in I Myself Am Woman, ed. Tani Barlow and Gary Bjorge (Beacon Press, 1990).
    • Mao Tse-tung (Mao Zedong), "Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan," in Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, vol. 1 (Foreign Languages Press, 1975), pp. 21-59.
    • Seminar H: Voices of Dissent
  10. The Nanjing Decade: 1928-1937 (December 8)
    • R. Keith Schoppa, Revolution and Its Past, chapters 11-12.
    • Susan Glosser, "Making the National Family," in Chinese Visions of Family and State, 1915-1953 (University of California Press, 2003), 81-133. [e-book]
    • Edgar Snow, Red Star Over China (Grove Press, 1968), pp. 11-18, 35-39, 89-113, 185-206.
    • Seminar I: Stability and Retreat

 

Spring Term

  1. UNIT III: THE RISE OF MAO

    The War of Resistance: 1937-1945 (January 12)
    • R. Keith Schoppa, Revolution and Its Past, chapters 13-14.
    • Joshua Fogel, ed., The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography (University of California Press, 2000). [e-book]
    • Seminar J: Japan's Visions for China
  2. The Civil War: 1945-1949 (January 19)
    • R. Keith Schoppa, Revolution and Its Past, chapter 15.
    • Chen Jian, Mao's China and the Cold War (University of North Carolina Press, 2001), chapters 1-2.
    • Joseph W. Esherick, "Ten Theses on the Chinese Revolution," Modern China 21, no. 1 (1995): 45-76.
    • Steven E. Phillips, Between Assimilation and Independence: The Taiwanese Encounter Nationalist China, 1945-1950 (Stanford University Press, 2003), chapter 4.
    • Seminar K: Coming Unglued
  3. Cold War in the Making (January 26)
    • Chen Jian, Mao's China and the Cold War, chapters 3-5 and 7-9.
    • Seminar L: The "Bamboo Curtain"
  4. Living the Revolution: City and Countryside (February 2)
    • R. Keith Schoppa, Revolution and Its Past, chapter 16.
    • Gail Hershatter, The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China's Collective Past (University of California Press, 2011), pp. 1-128.
    • Mao Tse-tung (Mao Zedong), "On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People," in Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, vol. 5 (Foreign Languages Press, 1975), pp. 384-421.
    • Optional: Julia Strauss, "Morality, Coercion and State Building by Campaign in the Early PRC: Regime Consolidation and After, 1949-1956," The China Quarterly 288 (2006): 891-912.
    • Seminar M: The Early PRC Years
  5. The Great Leap Forward (February 9)
    • R. Keith Schoppa, Revolution and Its Past, chapter 17.
    • Frank Dikotter, Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962 (Walker & Company, 2010), pp. 1-123.
    • Seminar N: Utopia/Dystopia
  6. Reading Week (February 16)

  7. UNIT IV: THE PATH TO GLOBAL CHINA

    The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution: 1966-1976 (February 23)
    • R. Keith Schoppa, Revolution and Its Past, chapter 18.
    • Melvyin C. Goldstein, Ben Jiao, and Tanzen Lhundrup, "Conflict and the Cultural Revolution: The Neymo Ani Incident of 1969," in Conflict and Social Order in Tibet and Inner Asia, ed. Fernanda Pirie and Toni Huber (Leiden: Brill, 2008), pp. 17-58.
    • Emily Honig, "Socialist Sex: The Cultural Revolution Revisited," Modern China 29, no. 2 (2003): 143-175.
    • Xiaoping Fang, "Introduction" and "Healing Styles and Medical Beliefs: The Consumption of Chinese and Western Medicines," in Barefoot Doctors and Western Medicine in China (University of Rochester Press, 2012), pp. 1-19 and 94-124.
    • Seminar O: Radicalism on the Margins
  8. The Era of Reconstruction: 1976-1989 (March 1)
    • Short Essay 2 due at beginning of lecture.
    • R. Keith Schoppa, Revolution and Its Past, chapter 19.
    • Emily Honig and Gail Hershatter, "The Pleasures of Adornment and the Dangers of Sexuality," in Personal Voices: Chinese Women in the 1980s (Stanford University Press, 1988), 41-80. [e-book]
    • Susan Greenhalgh, "Planned Births, Unplanned Persons: ‘Population’ in the Making of Chinese Modernity," American Ethnologist 30, no. 2 (2003): 196-215.
    • Yunxiang Yan, "The Good Samaritan’s New Trouble: A Study of the Changing Moral Landscape in Contemporary China," Social Anthropology 17, no. 1 (2009): 9-24.
    • James Farrer, "A Foreign Adventurer's Paradise? Interracial Sexuality and Alien Sexual Capital in Reform Era Shanghai," Sexualities 13, no. 1 (2010): 69-95.
    • Seminar P: From Mao to Deng
  9. 1989 and Its Aftermath (March 8)
    • R. Keith Schoppa, Revolution and Its Past, chapter 20.
    • Wei Jingsheng, “The Fifth Modernization: Democracy (December 1978),” in The Courage to Stand Alone (Viking, 1997), pp. 201-212.
    • Dingxin Zhao, The Power of Tiananmen: State-Society Relations and the 1989 Beijing Student Movement (University of Chicago Press, 2010), chapters 2, 5, and 6.
    • "It is Necessary to Take a Clear-Cut Stand Against Disturbances," Renmin ribao (People's Daily), 26 April 1989, and "Hunger Strike Announcement," in Beijing Spring, 1989, ed. Michel Oksenberg, Lawrence Sullivan, and Marc Lambert (M.E. Sharpe, 1990), pp. 206-208 and 258-260.
    • Optional: Hung Wu, "Tiananmen Square: A Political History of Monuments," Representations 35 (1991): 84-117.
    • Seminar Q: Tiananmen Democracy
  10. The PRC Empire: Centers and Peripheries (March 15)
    • R. Keith Schoppa, Revolution and Its Past, chapter 21.
    • Wang Gungwu, The Chinese Overseas: From Earthbound China to the Quest for Autonomy (Harvard University Press, 2002).
    • Judith Shapiro, "Introduction: The Big Picture," in China’s Environmental Challenges (Polity Press, 2013), 1-32.
    • Seminar R: New Imperial Formations

Summer Term

  1. Provincializing China and the Writing of History (April 26)
    • Dipesh Chakrabarty, "Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for 'Indian' Pasts?" Representations 37 (1992): 1-26.
    • Shu-mei Shih, "Against Diaspora: The Sinophone as Places of Cultural Production," in Global Chinese Literature: Critical Essays, ed. Jing Tsu and David Wang (Brill, 2010), pp. 29-48.
    • Q. Edward Wang, “Introduction,” in Inventing China through History: The May Fourth Approach to Historiography (State University of New York Press, 2001), pp. 1-26.
    • Huaiyin Li, “Introduction,” in Reinventing Modern China: Imagination and Authenticity in Chinese Historical Writing (University of Hawaii Press, 2012), pp. 1-32.
    • Optional: Gregor Benton and Edmund Terence Gomez, The Chinese in Britain, 1800-Present: Economy, Transnationalism, Identity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), chaps. 5-7. [e-book]
    • No Seminar
  2. Revision Session (May 3)
    • No Seminar
    • Optional Mock Exam due at noon in Howard's office on May 10, 2016
  3. Guest Lecture (May 10): Tze-hui Celina Hung (NYU Shanghai), "Creolizing the Sinophone Pacific" (4-6pm, WBS 1.015)