Instructor permission required. This course will explore key questions posed by the evolution of Chinese politics, from 1949 to the present, with a greater emphasis on the era of reform and opening beginning in 1978. Why did China choose Communism at the outset of the Cold War? What did Mao Zedong and his comrades inherit from thousands of years of imperial Confucian bureaucracy? Why did the Communist revolution go to such tragic excess, most notably with the Great Leap Forward famine and Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution? How was the CCP able to transition to first rural and then global capitalism, creating the worlds economic behemoth of the early 21st century? Why did the political reform movement of the 1980s fail, and what is its legacy? How has the rural majority been affected by the growth model devised in the 1990s, and what does the rural-urban gap portend for Chinas political future? How peaceful is Chinas rise, and what is the shape of its emerging foreign policy and diplomacy?
