China and Japan 1800 to 1949

3 units

This course focuses on China and Japan's encounters with the West in the 19th century and how that contact helped shape both nations' destinies in the first half of the 20th century. To resist Western intrusion, China and Japan ultimately had to transform themselves while attempting to preserve their cultural identity. China struggled for much of this time to find the correct formula for resistance, while Japan became a superpower only to plunge itself and China into the cataclysm of World War II. In this course, we examine why each followed the path it chose, the profound consequences of those decisions, and the personalities and events associated with the road through modernization and Westernization and to World War II.