Chinese History 116c: Modern Chinese Intellectual History

Course last offered in Spring 2002.

Course requirements: lecture attendance and discussion participation. An 8-10 page, type-written essay in lieu of the mid-term examination will be due by 5:00 PM at 2 Divinity Ave., Room 120, April 10, 2002. A final examination will take place in classroom (to be announced). Essay questions will be distributed in advance for the purpose of preparing for the final exam.

I. Confucian China in Crisis

January 30: The Sinic World in Perspective

February 6: The Impact of the West

Joseph R. Levenson, Confucian China and Its Modern Fate: A Trilogy (Berkeley, 1968)

February 13: From Reform to Revolution

Hao Chang, Chinese Intellectuals in Crisis: Search for Order and Meaning (1890-1911) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).
Harold Schiffrin, Sun Yat-sen: Reluctant Revolutionary (Boston, 1980)

II. Antitraditionalism and the Quest for National Unity

February 20: The May Fourth Movement

Vera Schwarcz, The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and Legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919 (Berkeley, 1986)

February 27: Liberalism, Anarchism and Socialism

Jerome B. Grieder, Hu Shih and the Chinese Renaissance: Liberalism in the Chinese Revolution, 1917-1937 (Cambridge, MA, 1970)
Arif Dirlik, Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution (Berkeley, 1991)

March 6: Cultural Conservatism and Confucian Humanism

Charlotte Furth, ed., The Limits of Change: Essays on the Conservative Alternatives in Republican China (Cambridge, MA, 1976).

III. The Socialist Transformation

March 13: Marxism as the Ruling Ideology

Maurice J. Meisner, Li Ta-chao and the Origins of Chinese Marxism (Cambridge, MA, 1967)
Benjamin Schwartz, Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao (Cambridge, MA, 1951).

March 20: The "Philosophy of Struggle"

Stuart R. Schram, The Thought of Mao Tse-tung (New York, 1989)
Tu Wei-ming, "Destructive Will and Ideological Holocaust: Maoism as a Source of Social Suffering in China," Daedalus, winter 1996.

Spring Break

April 3: A Search for China's Soul

Tu Wei-ming, ed., China in Transformation (Cambridge, MA, 1995).

IV. Critical Issues

April 10: Scientism

D, W. Y. Kwok, Scientism in Chinese Thought (New Haven, 1965)

April 17: Feminist and Ecological Critique of Modernity

Rey Chow, Women and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading between East and West (Minneapolis, 1991).

April 24: Democracy and Human Rights

Andrew Nathan, Chinese Democracy (New York, 1985)
Wm. T. de Bary, ed., Confucianism and Human Rights (New York, 1998).

May 1: The Chinese in the Global Community

Tu Wei-ming, ed., The Living Tree: Changing Meaning of Being Chinese Today (Stanford, 1995).