This subject explores major events, themes and issues in the history of China from the turn of the twentieth century to the 1970s. We begin with the failed attempt by the Qing dynasty to reassert its authority after the Boxer Rebellion debacle, and then move on to investigate how the country sought to reinvent itself through reforms and revolutions. We examine how various political figures and organizations experimented with constitutional monarchism, republicanism, revolutionary socialism and state socialism as they searched for an appropriate way of governance, crafting society and engaging the populace. Throughout the semester, we consider the extent to and means by which the citizenry, itself an unstable category, contributed to their society’s transformation under different regimes. We will also consider the meaning of “modernization” and how this concept intersects with other key terms in the study of twentieth-century China.

Lecture 1: Modernization, Modernity and Nation-building

Jonathan D. Spence, “Preface,” The Search for Modern China, 1^st edition (New York: W. W. Norton & Company), xiv–xxi.
Arif Dirlik, “Sisyphus in China,” Transitions, no. 55 (1992), 94–104

Lecture 2: Constitutional Monarchism and the 1911 Revolution

David Strand, “Slapping Song Jiaoren,” An Unfinished Republic: Leading by Word and Deed in Modern China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 13–51.

Lecture 3: A Troubled Republic

Edward A. McCord, “Toward a Social History of Modern Chinese Warlordism,” Journal of Chinese Military History, vol. 11 (2022), 34–55.

Lecture 4: New Culture and the May Fourth Movement

Fabio Lanza, “The Displacement of Learning,” Behind the Gate: Inventing Students in Beijing (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 122–45.

Lecture 5: The Nationalist Revolution

Marie-Claire Bergère, “Sun’s Last Years: National Revolution and Revolutionary Nationalism, 1920–1925,” Sun Yat-sen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 287–419.

Lecture 6: Nanjing Decade

Eugenia Lean, “The Making of a Public: Emotions and Media Sensation in 1930s China,” Twentieth-Century China, vol. 29 (2004), 39–61.

Lecture 7: Urban Life and the New Life Movement

Brian Tsui, “The Masses: A Youth Movement for the Conservative Revolution,” China’s Conservative Revolution : The Quest for a New Order, 1927–1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 68–115.

Lecture 8: War of Resistance

Rana Mitter, “Massacre in Nanjing,” Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II, 1937–1945 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013), 68–115.

Lecture 9: Civil War

Odd Arne Westad, “The Chase: Crossing the Yangzi,” Decisive Encounters: The Chinese Civil War, 1946–1950 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 215–55.

Lecture 10: The Early People’s Republic – New Democracy

Elizabeth Perry, “Masters of the Country? Shanghai Workers in the Early People’s Republic,” in Dilemmas of Victory: The Early Years of the People’s Republic of China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 59-79.

Lecture 11: Between Radicalism and Bureaucratic State-building

Rebecca E. Karl, “Great Leap and Restoration, 1958–1965,” Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth-Century World (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), 99–116.

Lecture 12: The Cultural Revolution

Mobo Gao, “The Cultural Revolution,” Gao Village: Rural Life in Modern China (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1999), 142-70.

Lecture 13: China in the Twentieth-Century World – Diplomacy and Internationalism

William C. Kirby, “China’s Internationalization in the Early People’s Republic: Dreams of a Socialist World Economy,” The China Quarterly, no. 188 (2006), 870–90.

[Topics and reading materials will be subject to changes.]

Book chapters will be provided in digital form. Please download journal articles from the library website. Students are expected to have read the assigned materials before coming to lectures and tutorials.

No textbook is assigned for this course. Students may refer to relevant sections of Jonathan Spence, The Search for Modern China (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013) and Klaus Mühlhahn, Making China Modern: From the Great Qing to Xi Jinping (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019), among others, for solid narratives of the period under study. Those with no background in Chinese history should read chapters 11 and 12 of Patricia Buckley Ebrey, The Cambridge Illustrated History of China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022) for the basics.

As this course is delivered in English, knowledge of Chinese is not assumed. Chinese-speaking students can refer to Chinese versions of reading materials if they wish.

Students will be divided into groups and deliver an oral report (15%) on the assigned primary source. The presentation should introduce the background against which a source was produced, its principal contents, historical significance, and scholarly assessments of it. Presenters should be prepared to respond to questions and comments (5%) from their peers and their tutor.

The other 10% will be rewarded for attendance at the four scheduled tutorials and posing relevant and informed questions to the presenting group. Please read all assigned materials regardless of whether you are presenting.

To facilitate interaction and discussion, students must attend all four tutorials (16:30–18:15). Please provide a reason (sickness, family emergency, representing the University or a region/country in competitions, etc.) and documentation if you need to be absent. Otherwise, 2.5% will be deducted for missing a tutorial.

Tutorial One
Lu Xun, “Kong Yiji” (1919)

Tutorial Two
Emergency Law for the Suppression of Crimes Against the Safety of the Republic (1931)

Tutorial Three
Mao Zedong, “On the People’s Democratic Dictatorship” (1949)

Tutorial Four
Lei Feng’s Diary (1963)

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 https://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.