Time: M 4:30-7:00pm Instructor: Professor Tong 唐老师
When people are asked about environmental challenges in China today, they tend to recall familiar images of Beijing’s notorious smog, coal-fired power plants, the Three Gorges dam, toxic runoff in rivers, endangered species, and displaced families. These images illustrate the severity of environmental degradation in contemporary China, which anyone who has spent even a day in a Chinese city would not deny. The question is: how has China become the way it is today? In this course, you will learn about how modernization and industrialization transformed China and its environment in the 20th century. Through a variety of materials such as fiction, history, cinema, and scholarly prose, you will study the interplay between modern Chinese culture, society, and the environment. This course is designed for undergraduates with little or no background in Chinese language and culture. Students interested in Asian languages and cultures are encouraged to enroll. All class discussions, assignments, and materials will be in English.
Student Learning Objectives
By the end of this course, you will be able to: (1) recall major events in modern China in the 20th and 21st centuries; (2) interpret literary and cultural productions in their historical contexts; (3) improve your ability to think critically and write academic papers; and (4) develop a culminating project relevant to the theme of this course.
Course Materials
- 1) Wolf Totem, Jiang Rong, trans. Howard Goldblatt
- 2) Lillian Li, Fighting Famine in North China
- 3) Robert Marks, China: An Environmental History (2nd edition)
- 4) Judith Shapiro, China’s Environmental Challenges (2nd edition)