HIST4700RH 公眾歷史專題研究:近代中國的女性、政治與社會

COURSE DESCRIPTION

This course is an intellectual inquiry into woman’s lives in social, political, and cultural contexts from the period of late 19^th century to the present. We will employ a hybrid chronological and thematic approach to explore the personal experience of women as well as the contexts of society and politics in different times that women lived in. We will discuss the agency of women not merely as passive observers but at times as contributors to shape history. We will read scholarly materials and examine primary sources of memoirs, autobiographies, biographies, and oral history accounts to probe key aspects of women’s lives and the diverse paths they traversed in modern China from the late Qing dynasty, through the Republican era to the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949 and all the way to the present. We will focus not only on those who are known in history, but also on ordinary individuals whose lives were affected, changed, destroyed, interrupted, empowered, and inspired by the forces of history. We will examine both the powerful and the powerless, and the power of the powerless to affect their own destiny. The course will employ a flipped classroom approach with an aim to cultivate community, collaboration, and creativity. Students are also encouraged to contribute to the documentation of women in social and political condition at different periods of history.

WEEKLY TOPICS (Tentative)

1. Introduction:Gendered Memory: Official History and Popular Memories of Women
2. Heaven and Earth: Women of Late Qing China: From Empress Dowager to “A Daughter of Han”
3. May 4^th Revolutionaries and Writers
4. Three Sisters and Three Paths in Republican China
5. “Stand by Your Man”: Revolutionary Wives from Yan’an to Beijing
6. Fiction writers and women in fiction: Ding Ling, Eileen Chang, Wang Anyi
7. Party, State, and Society: The All-China Women’s Federation
8. Arts and Pop Culture of the 1980: Mainland, Hong Kong, and Taiwan
9. Reproducing the Nation: Women and the One-child Policy
10. Factory girls, Sexual workers, and Left-behind children
11. Social Movements of Resistance
12. Overseas Chinese women
13. Review and Reflections: Between feminism and feminine

How to Succeed in This Course?

• • Actively engage in class discussions and activities. Please note that attending classes and finishing all assignments are necessary, but not sufficient conditions for getting a good grade. It is the quality of work that counts, just as in class it is the engagement in class activities that matter.
  • Finish all required assignments.
  • Finish reading assignments before coming to class. It will help you to contribute to discussions.
  • Take notes in class. These notes will help your final projects as well as your other research requirements later such as your graduation thesis.
  • Be attentive when other students are presenting and speaking. Share your feedback and learn from each other. We speak with the possibility of being heard; we listen with the possibility of being changed.

Think critically and prepare to be challenged. When you challenge others, do so respectfully and with an open mind. I will provide feedback in class on your presentations, participations, and projects. This way, everyone can benefit from others’ achievements and mistakes. The feedback is not meant to embarrass you but to help improve your learning. Please be prepared that learning can be uncomfortable and you need to step out of your comfort zone.

GRADING

• Attendance and Participation (30%)
• News Presentation (10%)
• Final Project (60%)

The three-hour class format each week includes both lectures and tutorials.

References:

Barlow, Tani E., and Meng Yue. “Female Image and National Myth.” Essay. In Gender Politics in Modern China: Writing and Feminism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998.

Chang, Jung. Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China. Anchor, 2014.

Chang, Jung. Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China. Simon & Schuster, 2003.

Chang, Leslie T. Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2009.

Cohen, Paul A. History and Popular Memory: the Power of Story in Moments of Crisis. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2017.

Davin, D. Woman-Work: Women and the Party in Revolutionary China. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979.

Di Bai, “Feminism in the Revolutionary Model Ballets The White-Haired Girl and The Red Detachment of Women,” in Art in Turmoil: The Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966–1976, ed. Richard King (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010), 188–202; and Rosemary Roberts, “Performing Gender in Maoist Ballet: Mutual Subversions of Genre and Ideology in The Red Detachment of Women,” Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific, vol. 16 (2008): 1–26.

Fincher, Leta Hong. Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China. Zed Books, 2014.

Fong, Mei. One Child: The Story of China’s Most Radical Experiment. London: Oneworld, 2016.

Gilmartin, Christina K. Engendering China: Women, Culture, and the State . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1994.

Goldman, Merle. Literary Dissent in Communist China. Harvard University Press, 2014.

Greenhalgh, Susan, and Edwin A. Winkler. Governing China’s Population: From Leninist to Neoliberal Biopolitics. Stanford (Calif.): Stanford University Press, 2005.

Greenhalgh, Susan. Just One Child: Science and Policy in Deng’s China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.

Hershatter, Gail, Emily Honig, Susan Mann, and Lisa Rofel. Guide to Women’s Studies in China. Berkeley, CA: Center for Chinese Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 1998.

Hershatter, Gail. Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth Century Shanghai . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

Hershatter, Gail. The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.

Hershatter, Gail. The Workers of Tianjin, 1900-1949 . Stanford: Stanford Univ Press, 1986.

Hershatter, Gail. Women and China’s Revolutions. Lanham: Rowman et Littlefield, 2019.

Hershatter, Gail. Women in China’s Long Twentieth Century . Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.

Honig, Emily, and Gail Hershatter. Personal Voices: Chinese Women in the 1980’s. Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1998.

Honig, Emily. Sisters and Strangers Women in the Shanghai Cotton Mills, 1919-1949. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1999.

Honig, Emily. Sisters and Strangers: Women in the Shanghai Cotton Mills, 1919-1949. Stanford, Calif: Stanford Univ. Press, 1999.

Johnson, Kay Ann. China’s Hidden Children: Abandonment, Adoption and the Human Costs of the One-Child Policy . Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press, 2017.

Johnson, Kay Ann. Women, the Family, and Peasant Revolution in China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.

Judge, Joan, and Ying Hu. Beyond Exemplar Tales: Women’s Biography in Chinese History. Berkeley, CA: Global, Area, and International Archive, University of California Press, 2011.

Judge, Joan, and Ying Hu. Beyond Exemplar Tales: Women’s Biography in Chinese History. Berkeley, CA: Global, Area, and International Archive, University of California Press, 2011.

Kadeer, Rebiya. Dragon Fighter: One Woman’s Epic Struggle for Peace with China. Carlsbad, ca: Kales Press, 2011.

Li, Laura Tyson. Madame Chiang Kai-Shek: China’s Eternal First Lady. New York: Grove Press, 2007.

Li, Xiaobing, and Qiang Fang. A Century of Student Movements in China: The Mountain Movers. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2020.

Lian, Xi. Blood Letters: The Untold Story of Lin Zhao, A Martyr in Mao’s China. New York: Basic Books, 2018.

Ling, Chai. A Heart for Freedom: the Remarkable Journey of a Young Dissident, Her Daring Escape, and Her Quest to Free Chinas Daughters. Carol stream (Ill.): Tyndale House, 2011.

LiQun, Qian. 拒絕遺忘「一九五七年學」研究筆記 [Refuse to Forget: The Research Notes of “1957 Study”]. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Liu, Lydia He, Rebecca E. Karl, and Dorothy Ko. The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013.

Mackinnon, Janice R., and Stephen R. Mackinnon. Agnes Smedley: the Life and Times of an American Radical. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.

Ning, and Ida Pruitt. A Daughter of Han: the Autobiography of a Chinese Working Woman. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011.

Pakula, Hannah. The Last Empress: Madame Chiang Kai-Shek and the Birth of Modern China . New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2010.

Qing, Dai. 我的四個父親――自己的故事 [My four fathers: My Story]. Hong Kong: Ming Pao Publications, 1995.

Ramusack, Barbara N., and Sharon Sievers. Women in Asia: Restoring Women to History. Bloomington etc.: Indiana University Press, 1999.

Roberts, Dexter Tiff. The Myth of Chinese Capitalism: The Worker, the Factory, and the Future of the World. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2020.

Sin-Lin, and Steven I. Levine. Shattered Families, Broken Dreams: Little-Known Episodes from the History of the Persecution of Chinese Revolutionaries in Stalin’s Gulag: Rescued Memoirs and Archival Revelations. Portland, ME: MerwinAsia, 2012.

Strong, Tracy B., and Helene Keyssar. Right in Her Soul: The Life of Anna Louise Strong. New York, NY: Random House, 1983.

Terrill, Ross. Madame Mao: The White Boned Demon . Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.

Veg, Sebastian. Popular Memories of the Mao Era: from Critical Debate to Reassessing History. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2019.

Watson, Rubie S., and Patricia Buckley Ebrey. Marriage and Inequality in Chinese Society. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.

Witke, Roxane. Comrade Chiang Ch’ing. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1977.

Yang, Xianhui. Woman from Shanghai: Tales of Survival from a Chinese Labor Camp. Translated by Wen Huang. New York: Anchor Books, 2010.

Yihe, Zhang. 最後的貴族 [The Last Noble]. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

CLASS PARTICIPATION AND ACTIVITIES

This is a student-centered class grounded in the concept of “flipped learning.” Students are expected to be actively engaged in class and to work with other students. Class activities include group discussions, presentations, lectures, documentary/film screenings, and reenactment of historical scenes.

We will work together to create an environment for intellectual dialogues and to cultivate informed, responsible, and engaged citizens. Being empathetic and inclusive does not mean that we avoid core issues; it does not absolve us from our responsibility to engage in critical thinking and honest intellectual debates while treating each other with courtesy and respect. I also recognize that each of us has our own individual differences and preferences in learning styles and strategies. I will keep that in mind and will work with each of you to bring the best out of your potential and talent.  

Discussion Teams and Team Leaders

At the beginning of the semester, the class will be divided into discussion teams and team members will take turns to be leaders of their team during the semester. Each student learns to take responsibility as a leader as well as work as a team member under the leadership of another student. We all learn both as individuals and as members of groups to which we belong.

Group Discussions

Each class will start with group discussions. We will divide into small groups to discuss major issues relating to the reading materials of the day. In order to participate in group discussions, you will have to finish reading and or watching the required materials before coming to class, know the basic facts, and establish their relations to the larger context. Students will have the chance to work with their own discussion team members as well as other students in the class. By the end of the semester, you will have worked with other classmates in your teamwork. Towards the end of each class, we will vote for the best discussant of the day – one team one vote!

News Presentation on Current Affairs or on Tutorial Topics

Students are expected to keep abreast of news reporting on current developments in China. The present is shaped by the past. The present also continually shapes and reshapes our understanding of the past. Past and present are not separate, but co-exist, sometimes in harmony, sometimes in tension. Students will present with their groups to the class the background (historical, social, political, and/or cultural) of the topic you are presenting, the core facts of the issue (who/what/how/when), the implications, and your critical response. The main challenge is to try to understand the current developments in light of the broader picture, and to discover the historical undercurrents that continue to shape the present. You are encouraged to conduct more research on the issues you are presenting. Imagine that you were the professor and you were to teach your students what you have learned from the materials. After the presentation, students are encouraged to ask questions and provide feedback to the presenters.

Attention is drawn to University policy and regulations on honesty in academic work, and to the disciplinary guidelines and procedures applicable to breaches of such policy and regulations. Details may be found at http://www.cuhk.edu.hk/policy/academichonesty/.

With each assignment, students will be required to submit a signed declaration that they are aware of these policies, regulations, guidelines and procedures.

• In the case of group projects, all members of the group should be asked to sign the declaration, each of whom is responsible and liable to disciplinary actions, irrespective of whether he/she has signed the declaration and whether he/she has contributed, directly or indirectly, to the problematic contents.
• For assignments in the form of a computer-generated document that is principally text-based and submitted via VeriGuide, the statement, in the form of a receipt, will be issued by the system upon students’ uploading of the soft copy of the assignment.

Assignments without the properly signed declaration will not be graded by teachers.

Only the final version of the assignment should be submitted via VeriGuide.

The submission of a piece of work, or a part of a piece of work, for more than one purpose (e.g. to satisfy the requirements in two different courses) without declaration to this effect shall be regarded as having committed undeclared multiple submissions. It is common and acceptable to reuse a turn of phrase or a sentence or two from one’s own work; but wholesale reuse is problematic. In any case, agreement from the course teacher(s) concerned should be obtained prior to the submission of the piece of work.