Prof Stephan Feuchtwang

Compulsory for students on MSc China in Comparative Perspective and optional for MSc Anthropology and Development, MSc Social Anthropology. This course is also available as an outside option where regulations permit and with the permission of the course teacher, places are limited and priority is given to MSc China in Comparative Perspective students.

The main object of the course is to help students develop ways of putting the politics, economy and social life of China into a framework in which they can compare and juxtapose it with other major examples. Students will bring whatever theoretical approaches they have learned and are continuing to learn in the disciplines they bring to the course. They will be expected to demonstrate and explain how they are using them as well as to listen to other approaches and disciplinary perspectives.

The course begins with civilisation, China as empire, and its political and economic history then moves to current conditions of migration, urbanization, the family and medium scale institutions of the local state, civil society and democracy. The topics for each week are as follows:

1. Occidentalism and orientalism; 2. Civilisation: centre, periphery, hierarchy; 3. Imperialism and the history of world systems; 4. Globalisation and the long term of political-economic history; 5. Economic and demographic comparisons; 6. Famine and the modern state; 7. Statehood and national independence; 8. After revolution and cold war; 9. The project of modernisation; 10. Reform, race and technologies of the self; 11. Rural-urban linkages and the liberalisation of economic relations; 12. The Urban; 13. Family, gender and modernisation; 14. Property rights; 15. Consumerism; 16. School and ideology; 17. Civil society; 18. Democracy, the law, and political reform; 19. The state as a field of politics; 20. Protest and social movement.

Four non-assessed essays presented in tutorials for learning and practice for the end-of-course examination.

One-hour lectures MT, LT, ST and one-hour seminars MT, LT, ST.

Kent G.Deng, ‘Development and its deadlock in imperial China’ Economic Development and Cultural Change 51:2, January 2003 pp 479-522;
Hill Gates, China’s Motor: A Thousand Years of Petty Capitalism. Cornell University Press. 1996 (chapters 1-5);
Jack Goody, The Theft of History. Cambridge University Press. 2006;
Sudipta Kaviraj and Sunil Khilnani (eds) Civil society: history and possibilities. CUP 2001;
Jonathan D.Spence, The Search for Modern China. London: Hutchinson 1990;
Norman Stockman, Understanding Chinese Society. Polity 2000;
Peter van de Veer and H. Lehmann (eds), Nation and Religion: Perspectives on Europe and Asia. 1999;
Yan Yunxiang Private Life under Socialism; Love, Intimacy, and Family Change in a Chinese Village 1949-1999. Stanford University Press 2003;
Peter Zarrow, China in War and Revolution, 1895-1949. Routledge. 2005

A three-hour examination in ST.