Photographs: Tese Wintz Neighbor Top Ten Things to Know about China in the Twenty-First Century, August 19. 2014 1 TEN: THE PAST IS NOT SO FAR AWAY China is one of the world’s oldest continuous civilizations. This ancient culture of shared legends, rituals, ideas, traditions, and written language helps to explain even today why the Chinese people act the way they do and how they interpret their world. The Chinese early on set up a pantheon of “brilliant human beings” who were “inventors of Chinese culture.” These extraordinary “mythical sages” were fathers of agriculture, industry, family institutions, and writing. They domesticated animals and invented boats and carts, ploughs and hoes, and bows and arrows. They established calendars and rituals, state institutions and hereditary succession. One of them was Yu the Great, who supposedly founded the Xia Dynasty (ca. 2200–1750 BCE). This legendary father of flood control is in the Chinese news even today. The Chinese compare his great flood-quelling ability with that of the engineers who built the 59 billion dollar Three Gorges Dam on the Yangzi River. It is the largest undertaking in Chinese history since the Great Wall. This dam (completed in 2012) – along with new ones rising up – are being built to not only tame floods but to generate power to feed the new factories of the world. China’s present continues to reflect seminal ideas and great discoveries from China’s past. For example, 3,000-year-old oracle bone inscriptions included the following divination: “Lady Hao gave birth and it may not be good.” And verification: “She gave birth. It really was not good. It was a girl.” China’s strict birth control policy introduced in 1979 has been at loggerheads with such attitudes that have survived three millenniums. While this policy is beginning to loosen up now, for the past three decades many women were caught in a catch-22. They were permitted to conceive one or two children by the government but criticized (and worse) by their husbands and parents-in- law when that child is a girl because of the ancient tradition that says women must bear a son to secure the male family line. In rural China, especially, this “moral” obligation reinforced a “practical” one. Since most daughters still leave their families, and often villages, when they marry, a son provides rural parents with necessary social security in old age. China’s past is important for us to study so that we understand Chinese reactions to modern events. * For more than a decade leading up to Hong Kong rejoining Mainland China in 1997, thousands of front-page articles in the foreign press predicted political, economic, and social chaos. But to my Chinese friends, home and abroad, the handover was above all a * Other modern symbolic event, the official end to China’s “unequal” relations with Western powers events of historical since the first Opium War (1839–42). Chinese of all ages would discuss this war and the significance: hundred-plus years following as some of the darkest pages in Chinese history. As the Macao handover, various clocks throughout China counted down the month, day, hour, minute, and WTO membership, second until July 1, 1997, so too did many Chinese as they symbolically threw off years Beijing Olympics, of suffering, war, division, and strife—and embraced their modern “equal” world nation Shanghai World status. Expo. INTRODUCTION TO CHINESE HISTORY & PHILOSOPHY Online Lecture Videos: ChinaX Peter K. Bol, William C. Kirby, & others / HarvardX / 2013 https://www.edx.org/course-list/harvardx/history/allcourses Taught by two Harvard professors, ChinaX is a free online course – divided into 10 six-week modules – that introduces the entire 5,000 year history of China from the earliest Bronze age settlement to the present time. Each six-week module focuses on a particular period of China and is divided into weekly topics; each weekly topic is, in turn, divided into five to 10 minute lecture and discussion videos. The lecture material is accessible to a non-specialist audience and can be used in the classroom as a basis for discussing certain topics. This online course series comes highly recommended and has no equal among free and paid video course options. Top Ten Things to Know about China in the Twenty-First Century, August 19. 2014 2 Website: Asia for Educators Asia for Educators Staff / Asia for Educators at Columbia University / 2009 http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/main_pop/kpct/index.html The Asia for Educators website features a number of resources to help the educator understand and develop lesson plans for the study of East Asia. Of particular interest to the educator are the extensive timelines, introductions, primary documents, and lesson plans covering just about every period of Chinese history up to the present. Online Course Sources: General Introduction to Early China Robert Eno / Early Chinese Thought course at Indiana University / Fall 2010 http://www.indiana.edu/~p374/Home.html Professor Eno's online course material for Early Chinese Thought includes several accessible introductions to the various schools of Chinese philosophy. A particular piece worth reading is his 13-page “General Introduction to Early China” (found in the “Online Course Material” section), which provides a thorough introduction to the geography, culture, and language of early Chinese civilization. Website: A Visual Sourcebook of Chinese Civilization Patricia Buckley Ebrey / University of Washington / early 2000s http://depts.washington.edu/chinaciv/index.htm In developing this sourcebook, the author states, “the goal of this "visual sourcebook" is to add to the material teachers can use to help their students understand Chinese history, culture, and society. It was not designed to stand alone; we assume that teachers who use it will also assign a textbook with basic information about Chinese history.” The website features a dozen 100-page teacher guides to Chinese geography, archeology, and the fine arts. Includes related picture galleries. Article: Timeline of East Asian History Mark Bender / East Asian Humanities course at Ohio State University / 2006 http://people.cohums.ohio-state.edu/bender4/eall131/EAHReadings/module02/m02chinese.html This is a short, comprehensive timeline of Chinese history from the early Bronze period to contemporary times with a particular focus on several particular “themes” of Chinese history: dynasty rise and fall, aggression from outsiders, openness to outsiders, and government stability. Includes related charts, pictures, and maps. Article: Why are Hundreds of Harvard Students Studying Ancient Chinese Philosophy? Christine Gross-Loh / The Atlantic / October 8th 2013 http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/10/why-are-hundreds-of-harvard-students- studying-ancient-chinese-philosophy/280356/ “Puett's course Classical Chinese Ethical and Political Theory has become the third most popular course at the university. […] Puett began offering his course to introduce his students not just to a completely different cultural worldview but also to a different set of tools. He told me he is seeing more students who are 'feeling pushed onto a very specific path towards very concrete career goals' than he did when he began teaching nearly 20 years ago.” FURTHER READING Book: China: A New History John King Fairbanks & Merle Goldman / Havard Belknap Press / 2006 – Second Ed. http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674018280 Top Ten Things to Know about China in the Twenty-First Century, August 19. 2014 3 From the publisher: “John King Fairbank was the West’s doyen on China, and this book is the full and final expression of his lifelong engagement with this vast ancient civilization. It remains a masterwork without parallel. The distinguished historian Merle Goldman brings the book up to date, covering reforms in the post-Mao period through the early years of the twenty-first century, including the leadership of Hu Jintao. She also provides an epilogue discussing the changes in contemporary China that will shape the nation in the years to come.” Book: The Search for Modern China Jonathan D. Spence / W.W. Norton & Company / 976 pages / 2012 – Third Ed. http://books.wwnorton.com/books/The-Search-for-Modern-China/ From the publisher: “This text, the classic introduction to modern China for students and general readers, emerged from Spence’s highly successful introductory course at Yale, in which he traced the beginnings of modern China to internal developments beginning in the early 17th century. Strong on social and political history, as well as Chinese culture and its intersections with politics, this paperback is a longstanding leader in the survey course on modern China.” Book: The Rise of Modern China Immanuel C. Y. Hsu / Oxford University Press / 1136 pages / 1999 – Sixth Edition http://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-rise-of-modern-china-9780195125047 From the publisher: “China enters the twenty-first century in the best international position it has known since the mid-eighteenth century. The prolonged period of internal decay and external exploitation has given way to vibrant rejuvenation and national rebirth. The century-old search for wealth, power, and recognition seems to be within reach. Its growing economic, military, and political clout has earned it international acknowledgment as a regional superpower in Asia-Pacific, and an emergent superpower possibly by 2020. The Rise of Modern China, now in its sixth edition, has been updated to examine the return of Hong Kong in 1997 and the upcoming return of Macao in 1999. Hsu discusses the end of the last vestiges of foreign imperialism in China, as well as China's emergence as a regional and global superpower. U.S.-China rivalry and the prospect of unification between China and Taiwan are also considered, and the further readings sections have been entirely revised.” Top Ten Things to Know about China in the Twenty-First Century, August 19.