Cities and Urban Culture in China

Treats the development of cities and urban culture in China from roughly the sixteenth century (the beginning of a great urban boom) to the present. We will look at the physical layout of cities, city government and social structure, and urban economic life, often from a comparative perspective. The course focuses, however, on the changing culture of city life, tracing the evolution of a vernacular popular culture from the late imperial period, through the rise of Shanghai commercial culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to the diverse regional urban cultures of contemporary China.