Course Description

This course examines Chinese civilization through the question “What is China?” Rather than treating China as a fixed cultural essence or a self-evident nation, the course asks how China has been interpreted as culture, territory, ethnicity, history, moral order, imperial state, social-economic formation, modern nation-state, and contemporary civilizational state.Using Ge Zhaoguang’s What Is China? as the conceptual backbone, the course explores how the boundaries and meanings of China have been debated across history: between culture and state, Han and non-Han, inside and outside, empire and nation, civilization and modern political community. These questions connect historical interpretation with politics, economics, ethics, and public life.

The course also considers Chinese self-interpretations and external, especially Western, interpretations of China. Western interpretations have variously presented China as a Confucian moral civilization, a rational bureaucratic order, an Oriental despotism, a stagnant agrarian empire, a revolutionary society, a developmental state, and a challenge to the liberal international order. These interpretations are examined for both their insights and their limits.Drawing on history, philosophy, political thought, and political economy, the course introduces students to competing ways of interpreting Chinese civilization. Students will learn not only major themes in Chinese civilization, but also how to evaluate what different interpretations reveal and obscure about China’s historical formation and contemporary significance.

Course Learning Outcomes

On completing the course, students will be able to:

1. Explain how the question “What is China?” can be approached through territory, ethnicity, culture, history, political order, economic life, and civilizational identity.
2. Analyze major interpretive frameworks for Chinese civilization, including moral, imperial, tianxia/world-order, social-economic, national, socialist, developmental-civilizational, and Western frameworks.
3. Compare Chinese self-interpretations with external, especially Western, interpretations of China and evaluate what each reveals and obscures.
4. Evaluate continuities and ruptures in the formation of China from classical, imperial, late imperial, modern, socialist, and contemporary periods.
5. Communicate critical interpretations of Chinese civilization through tutorial discussion, group presentation, and assessment tasks.

Offer Semester and Day of Teaching

Second semester (Wed)