From Cold War to "New Cold War": Politics and Political Theory in Contemporary China (1949-2027)

3 credits · Undergraduate

In 1949, most Western observers regarded the new People's Republic of China as a major but economically backward client of Moscow, an unlikely candidate for world power. Three quarters of a century later, the United States and China stand at the center of what many call a "New Cold War," and the analogy itself has become a political force: it tells us which past to reason from, and which futures to expect. Whether the analogy illuminates or misleads is a question that can only be answered historically. This course examines how China became the China of today, and how ideas and events made each other along the way. Moving chronologically from the revolution through the Mao years, reform, 1989, and the Xi Jinping era, we read the political arguments of each period in the historical circumstances that produced them, including land reform campaigns, famine, factory floors, student movements, and Party congresses. Our readings are primarily original texts by Chinese authors: leaders and dissidents, memoirists and novelists, liberals, New Leftists, and Confucian revivalists, alongside recent Chinese scholarship in translation. Studying the texts within their history reveals both the power of ideas to remake a society and the capacity of events to break ideas apart. To understand American democracy in this century, one must understand the rival that now shapes its horizon. The PRC is a one-party dictatorship that has nonetheless always described itself in democracy's vocabulary, and its record of authoritarian development attracts real audiences worldwide. Examining why a dictatorship insists on that vocabulary and how citizens have lived within it, and how some, at great cost, have invoked it to demand more, students will return to concepts they thought they knew - democracy, liberty, equality, the people - with sharper questions.