HIST 2639: The History of the People's Republic of China: Research Seminar

For long, 1949 marked a boundary that historians of China did not transgress. The post-1949 years were almost exclusively the domain of political scientists, sociologists, economists, and anthropologists. But over the last twenty years, spurred by the increasing openness of national and local archives, historians have offered new and compelling perspectives on the early years of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). By 2007, enough new work had emerged for the Mao era (1949-1976) to be posited as its own period of historical enquiry. Since then, the trend has only gathered steam. While some scholars have focused on the early years of Communist rule and written on issues of transition and consolidation, others have focused on the hardening urban-rural divide and on changes wrought in the country-side, including feminization of agriculture and deskilling across rural handicrafts industries. As notable is a focus on science, where historians are taking seriously the notion of socialist (mass) science and exploring its multifaceted history. An even younger generation of scholars is working on topics as diverse as drama, business, law, urban labor, publishing, museums, sports, and statistics.

Much of this work in PRC history is interesting because it asks new questions or re-approaches old questions with fresh materials, thereby offering a more fine-grained sense of the period. But it is also significantly new because it allows us to write PRC history from a transnational perspective, exploiting not just newly available archival materials within the PRC but also archives and repositories the world over. In similar fashion, the availability of increasingly sophisticated methods of text analysis combined with the greater availability of digitized textual sources from the period are beginning to allow us to add additional analytical tools to our repertoire.

In this research seminar students will explore this history by reading some of the most innovative work in the field and developing and presenting research that will culminate in a 25-35 page research paper. During the first half of the semester, each week’s readings will be accompanied by an exercise centered on a particular kind of source material—official sources, archival documents, memoirs, media, oral history. This will help prepare students for research in China by giving them practical experience of dealing with a variety of sources.