Modern China: From the Middle Kingdom to Mao and beyond

In this unit, you will learn the fundamentals of Chinese history since the First Opium War (1839-42), covering the nearly two centuries that have shaped the headline grabbing nation underpinning the global economy today. You will examine the surprising resilience of the faltering Qing Dynasty amid rebellion, ecological disaster and heightened imperialism of the 19th century; the great cultural and intellectual ferment around the founding of the Chinese Republic in 1912; and the rise of nationalism and China’s two rival Leninist-style party-states in the form of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists and Mao Zedong’s Communists. You will go on to consider Maoism in the height of the Cold War and the Cultural Revolution, before examining the reforms and explosion of production in the 1980s and 1990s, Tiananmen, and the growth of the country’s futuristic cities and infrastructure. In the process, you will learn to historicise the territorial claims and ethnic policies of the People’s Republic. You will explore Chinese history from social, cultural, economic, and political perspectives, helping you to become better acquainted with categories of critical analysis such as discourse, ethnicity, gender, and state-society relations in order to assess what modernity has meant for the largest nation on earth.