GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS OF CHINA Spring Semester 2015 - MW 2:00-3:20 W ooten Hall 116 David Mason 940-565-2386 e-mail:
[email protected] 152 W ooten Hall Office Hours: 10:00-11:00, 1:00-2:00 MW F TURNITIN.COM: class ID: 9265134 password: mason TEXTS: Tony Saich. 2011. Governance and Politics of China. 3RD EDITION. New York: Palgrave. Peter Hays Gries and Stanley Rosen, eds. 2010. Chinese Politics: State, Society, and the Market. New York: Routledge. Lucian Pye. 1991. China: An Introduction, 4th edition. New York: HarperCollings (photocopied chapters on Blackboard) I. COURSE OBJECTIVES This course is intended to give students an understanding of the political development, political culture, political institutions of the People's Republic of China (PRC). The PRC is the world's most rapidly growing economy. W ith the disintegration of the Soviet Union, it is also now the largest and most powerful Communist Party-ruled nation in the world. Yet the same effort to reform a centralized "command" style economic system that brought about the demise of the Soviet Union was initiated in China in 1978 and has succeeded beyond most people's expectations. At the same time, the post-Mao leadership that has engineered dramatic economic liberalization has resisted pressures to liberalize the political system. The tensions between economic liberalization and political authoritarianism erupted in the Tiananmen Square demonstrations of 1989. W hile similar mass demonstrations in Eastern Europe later that same year resulted in the demise of Communist Party rule there, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) suppressed the social movement of 1989 and preserved the party-state system intact.