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This class traces the footsteps of China’s struggle to transform itself from a multi-ethnic empire to a modern nation state. Many challenges that China is facing today, such as demographic pressure, social dislocation under rapid marketization, incorporation and governance of large non-Han areas, government finance with a huge centralizing bureaucracy, and encounters with capitalist powers from the West, originated in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. This class will examine the social and political processes in the late nineteenth through the twentieth century in this longer historical context. Topics covered will include legacies of the Qing empire, Sinocentric tributary system and Western imperialism, nationalist and communist revolutions, China in World Wars, socialist development under Mao, “socialist market economy” since Deng, competing reconstructions of Confucianism, and contentious historiographies about China’s past. <a href="http://bit.ly/1bebp5s" target="_blank">Click here to see evaluations, syllabi, and faculty bios</a>