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#304 Yan’an and Rectification

2/26/2018

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Sami Thomas public history presentation

Andrew Lim public history presentation

Check for Understanding

Initial discussion:
  • What does it mean to speak of literature and art as performing a social or political function?
  • Who is to decide what specific functions literature is to perform? The writer? The reader? The state? The dominant ideological apparatus?
  • Mao believes that literature is class-based and that it is disingenuous to pretend good literature is universal and timeless. Give arguments for and against these assertions.
  • Mao pins his hope of the revolution on the peasants of rural China rather than the exploited proletariat in major cities. How does such a view shape his literary and artistic policies?
  • Wang Shiwei, Ding Ling, and a few other writers came under strong criticism from the CCP in 1942. Why do you think the CCP leadership might have singled them out for criticism?

Rectification simulation:
  • You will be assigned a role: Pro-Wang faction, Anti-Wang faction, or intermediary.
  • As soon as you are assigned your role, meet within your groups. The anti-Wang faction will also select one of its members to serve as chair of the assembly. Once that person is selected, they will run the remainder of the simulation, guiding the proceedings, adding or subtracting rules as they wish.
  • While the factional meetings are going on, indeterminates should circulate between the two opposing factions to learn about their positions and strategies. They should also feel free to express their own concerns, raise questions, and engage the two factions in discussion. To win the indeterminates over to their side, both factions should answer the indeterminates’ questions as fully as possible without jeopardizing their strategies, while taking care that whatever they propose during the rest of the session will address the concerns raised by the indeterminates. The instructor should also circulate to answer questions as needed.
  • After an appropriate interval determined by the chair, the full group will meet to debate the future of Wang Shiwei. The chair will then moderate the debate with the time that remains.
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#303 Mao Zedong’s Rise to Power

2/22/2018

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Public history presentation by Chloe Powell

Discussion on Mao Zedong’s early life and rise to power:

  • To what extent should historians (and biographers) seek to make sense of adults based on their upbringing? Were you convinced by arguments such as “By Mao’s own account, from his earliest years he was constantly on guard against the tyranny of his father, who regularly beat him. . . . It is hardly surprising, then, that his fraught relationship with his stubborn, powerful father bred within him a deep-seated antiauthoritarianism” (Schell and Delury, 200).

  • What might it mean to describe Mao’s early writing (and arguably much of his later writing) as “romantic”? How might we reconcile such a description with his commitment to the supposedly “scientific” nature of Marx’s theories?

  • What factors do you think were most important in leading Mao to communism? In other words, what was appealing about this radical ideology for him?

  • How did Mao come to place his revolutionary hopes in China’s rural masses? How might we reconcile such a commitment with Marx’s own dismissal of the peasantry when he described them as the “homonymous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes” (Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon,” 1852). What did Mao see in the peasantry? Why do you think Marx had been so quick to dismiss them as revolutionary actors?

  • Since Joseph Schumpeter first coined the concept of “creative destruction” in the 1950s, it has become almost universally accepted as a model of economic transformation. What do Schell and Delury mean when they associate Mao with this concept? How might it be different than the market-oriented sense that Schumpeter introduced the term?

  • What does Mao mean by “contradictions” (maodun 矛盾)? What significance does he place on the concept and are you convinced by his approach?
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#302 Contested Memories of the Nanjing Massacre

2/22/2018

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To be updated.
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#301 Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek): The Generalissimo

2/21/2018

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Brief background
  • Jiang Jieshi was classically educated, though rose to power mainly through the military ranks of the Guomindang (much like Yuan Shikai, who had been born nearly thirty years earlier).
  • By 1924, Jiang had been appointed as first commandant of the elite Whampoa (Huangpu 黄埔) Academy.
  • When Sun Zhongshan died the next year, Jiang emerged as his successor.
  • Led the Northern Expedition (beifa 北伐) in 1926-27 and established a new national government based in Nanjing.
  • In the mid-1930s, he promoted the “New Life Movement” (Xin shenghuo yundong 新生活运动)
  • Japan soon encroached on Chinese territory, seizing Manchuria between 1931-33 and then escalating a full-scale war in July 1937.
  • Jiang initially focused his attention on the Communists, though after the Xi’an Incident in December 1936 he grudgingly agreed to a Second United Front with them to fight Japan.
  • Jiang’s wartime government at Chongqing was marred by economic crisis, low army morale, and rampant corruption.
  • After Japan was defeated in 1945, the Guomindang gradually lost ground until Jiang was forced to retreat to Taiwan in 1949.

Jiang Jieshi through the frame of a virtual gallery
  • With a partner, conduct a virtual “gallery walk” (Google Doc) through the maps, images, and excerpts collected. Consider:
    • Note the important elements that stand out in the gallery. Identify patterns you see emerging as you link up this exhibit and your reading last night.
    • Based on those observations, what new questions do you have as a historian and where might you go to get answers to those questions?
  • Rework the gallery:
    • Based on those questions, what do you think you might add or subtract from this gallery if you were to prepare a public history exhibition? What factors might drive those decisions?
  • If World War II had not broken out in 1937 in China, what kind of future do you think the future of Jiang’s Guomindang government might have looked like? How might it be similar or different from the China that emerged under the leadership of the Communists?
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Bridge Week

2/15/2018

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Thursday: Evening dinner and screening of Finding Samuel Lowe

Paula Madison grew up in Harlem knowing her Jamaican roots, but unaware that her maternal grandfather was a Chinese migrant worker. After retiring from NBC Universal as an executive, she began tracing the footsteps of her Hakka grandfather from Kingston to her ancestral family village by Shenzhen. Ms. Madison is the Chinese American Museum's 2015 winner of the Chinese American Heritage and Legacy Award and a board member at the Center for Asian American Media.

A few links for your reference:
  • Finding Samuel Lowe (film site)
  • "From Harlem to China: how an African-American tracked down her Chinese grandfather," in The South China Morning Post (17 May 2017).
  • Paula Madison keynote speech to RootsTech 2016 (YouTube)

Friday: Screening of excerpts from China: A Century of Revolution

Saturday: Labor activism in contemporary China

Michael Haack is an educator who has been active in grassroots movements across five continents, including in China, Myanmar (Burma), Israel-Palestine, Brazil, South Africa, Britain, and the United States. Mr. Haack teaches history and politics at the Houde Academy in Shenzhen, China. He is the former Campaigns Coordinator for the U.S. Campaign for Burma where he rallied grassroots support for USCB’s congressional, corporate, and international campaigns. He completed his graduate work at American University and the School for Oriental and African Studies. In 2016-17, Mr. Haack was awarded a one-year grant from the Chinese Scholarship Council to study at the Wuhan University of Science in Technology.
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Unit II assessment

2/13/2018

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Please use the link below to submit your unit II assessment as either a Word document (DOC, DOCX) or a PDF.
Submit
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#208 ​Lao She’s Teahouse

2/8/2018

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Left: photo of the author Lao She. Right: scene from the 2010 CCTV production of Teahouse (茶馆)

Background: Lao She (老舍, 1899-1966)
  • We get a nice synopsis about the author before the excerpts begin.
  • Here are two fascinating additions about his literary legacy from writer Paul French in the Los Angeles Review of Books:
    • “Set in the first half of the 20th century, his work describes the lives of dispossessed Chinese: Mr Ma and Son, his London novel, describes the experiences of being a Chinese in a Yellow Peril-obsessed Britain of the 1920s; Crescent Moon describes a family’s impoverishment and descent into prostitution; Rickshaw Boy, perhaps his most important and enduring novel, tells the futile and desperate story of a Beijing rickshaw puller; and Teahouse is a sprawling social commentary of one Chinese family from the late 19th century to the cataclysmic year of 1949. Along the way he produced numerous short stories, plays, and even an early Chinese science-fiction novel, Cat Country, which imagined a Chinese astronaut stranded on a Mars populated by debauched and decadent drug-addicted cats. His readers understood his commentaries on contemporary China, but the godfathers of China’s literary establishment didn’t always appreciate his modernist critiques and vernacular style—especially after the revolution, when Lao She fell foul of Mao’s Red Guards.”
    • “And still Lao She is censored, remade in the image of the Party, the only image allowed in China, then and now. In 2010, CCTV, China’s state broadcaster, screened a 39-episode adaptation of Teahouse with the requisite ‘official’ ending of a joyous ‘liberation’ in 1949 added; in recent theatrical adaptations of Lao She’s final work Beneath the Red Banner, a semi-autobiographical novel of the dying days of the Manchu Dynasty, mention is never officially made of the fact that the book remains unfinished, as the author was instructed by the Red Guards that all art and literature had to describe life since 1949. Still control is denied him, futility forced upon him. At his former home in Beijing his writing desk has been preserved as it was on his final day. The calendar turned to August 24, 1966. Keen, seemingly enthusiastic young student volunteers offer to answer any questions foreign visitors may have about Lao She. So let’s begin at the end and ask them what happened on that day? They turn away, embarrassed, giggle nervously, see the person asking the question as a problem, not even attempting a shilly-shally answer.”

Performance and analysis
  • We will divide the class into three groups covering pages 1-6 (A), 7-11 (B), and 12-18 (C), respectively.
  • Choose one short passage within the pages assigned to your group.
    • Prepare a short script for a narrator to describe the scene. If the audience could transport themselves into the scene, what would they see, hear, and smell? Are there any other important contextual details of note? (Feel free to sketch an image if you would like).
    • Perform your short selection (as written) for the class.
    • Prepare a short post-reading analysis. Among your observations, be sure to include:
      • How does this passage reflect the political, social, and economic conditions of Beijing—and China, more broadly—in 1922?  
      • What are some of the different philosophies and strategies employed by the characters to navigate the social changes of this period?

Discussion
  • What are some of the major concerns raised by the characters?
  • How might the characters in the play compare to the other figures we have encountered this unit: Liang Qichao, Sun Zhongshan, Chen Duxiu, Lu Xun (and his “madman”), He Zhen, Hu Shi, Li Dazhao, Mao Zedong, Deng Yingchao, and even Edward Hume. What similarities do you note? Differences?
  • This play unfolds during several the overlapping periods and movements: the nationalism of the May Fourth Movement, the intellectual foment and literary experimentation of the New Culture Movement, the instability of Warlordism, not to mention the founding of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP, in July 1921) and the increasing intensity of Christian missionary efforts. How do you see this play intersecting with these movements? And, how do the movements connect with and inform one another?
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#207 Edward Hume and Yale-in-China

2/8/2018

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Office hours with Professor Spence

Today we will start with some “office hours.” I’d like you to imagine that you are Jonathan Spence, former Sterling Professor of History at Yale University and author of To Change China: Western Advisers in China and more than a dozen other books. You have been asked to give advice to a visiting Hotchkiss student about to embark on a research project in their school archives. Based on your experience writing the chapter on Edward Hume, what suggestions might you give about:

  • (a) the type of evidence that is useful to incorporate,
  • (b) the kind of context that is helpful to readers, and
  • (c) any other aspects of the project that might be helpful.

Discussion:

After reading some materials from the Hotchkiss archives, was there anything about this chapter that seemed familiar? Was there anything that surprised you?

What is the nature of missionary work? To what extent is it simply part of imperialism?

On page 176, Hume notes that “China will no longer submit to the ethics or attitude of the ‘invader’, no matter what he comes to do.” What did he mean by this statement? How are the circumstances changing in the long- and shorter-terms? How did Yale-in-China adapt?

Locate the current Yale-China Association mission statement on its website. How has its goals and an institution remained consistent? How has it changed?
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#206 Workshop: Yale-in-China

2/5/2018

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Photographs of the Yale-in-China teachers and students. Both include Warren Seabury ('96) and are from The Vision of a Short Life: A Memorial of Warren Bartlett Seabury, One of the Founders of the Yale Mission College in China (Cambridge, Mass.: The Riverside Press, 1909).

Introduction:
Today we will be looking at archival material from the period that coincides with Unit II (“ ‘Slaves of a Lost Country’ or Masters of a New Culture?”), the period roughly from the turn of the twentieth century through the 1920s. More specifically, we will be interested in the connection between Hotchkiss and the Yale-in-China program. This lesson fits both within the narrative of China’s “fall and rise” as well as serving as an important stepping stone for our class project about Hotchkiss and China. We will follow up this exercise with a reading on Yale-in-China (due Thursday) and you will utilize the skills from this exercise in your course project.

Learning goals:
By engaging in this activity, students will be able to:
  • Learn about the range of resources available for original research at Hotchkiss and the procedures for accessing and carefully handling materials from the Archives and Special Collections.
  • Practice engaging the resources to pull out useful information and identify significant themes.
  • Gain insight into Hotchkiss’s relationship with the Yale-in-China program.
  • Build a working relationship with Ms. Davis (Archives) and Ms. Baldwin (Special Collections).

Archives tour

We will meet in Library Media Center (our usual classroom). We will drop off backpacks/belongings and head down to the Archives for a tour with Ms. Davis. Here is some of the information (Google Doc) she will be sharing with us.

Background on Hotchkiss and China project

Ms. Baldwin will share some background on her experience working with Archival material in her Hotchkiss and China project. An editable version of this document (Google Doc) has been created for our class. Today we will be examining material aligned with the first section, “Missionaries and Headmasters.”

Warm up activity: Early clips from The Record

We will take a look at these early Record articles (PDF). I recommend starting individually by reading the highlighted selections. Keeping in mind that these are only a few sentences each, discuss with a partner:
  • What are some of the themes you see?
  • What are some questions that these news snippets might generate to guide an investigation into this period?

Working in the Archives activity: Yale-in-China

Using the “Working in the Archives” guide (PDF), you will have the flexibility to move through the materials on your own pace—or, if you prefer, with a partner to accomplish the following tasks:
  • Conduct a survey of the materials you have available to you.
  • Dig more deeply into one document that interests you and complete the document analysis exercise.
  • As you reach the end of the activity, consider skipping ahead to connecting with the Hotchkiss and China document (see instructions below).

Debrief
  • Discuss:
    • What are some of the themes you see from the documents as a whole?
    • What are some questions that these news snippets might generate to guide an investigation into this period?
  • Connect with the Hotchkiss and China document (Google Doc):
    • Informal notes can be added as comments.
    • ​Alternatively, you can add directly into the text. Please include footnote citations for new information added!
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#205 Lu Xun's Outcry

2/1/2018

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Left: Photo of Lu Xun in 1930 (Source: China Story), Center: A 1974 portrait of Lu Xun by Li Yitai titled "Marxism is the most lucid and lively philosophy: a portrait of Lu Xun" (Source: China Story), Right: A woodcut illustration accompanying "Diary of a Madman" (Source: Harvard).

Background on Lu Xun
  • Lu Xun was born in Shaoxing, in Zhejiang province in 1881 and was known to those around him as Zhou Shuren. His hometown is notable for its networks of native sons in government and abroad, a group that counted increasingly reformist—even radical—figures at the end of the Qing dynasty, including educator Cai Yuanpei (1868-1940), anti-Manchu revolutionary Qiu Jin (1875-1907—her cousin and co-conspirator, Xu Xilin, is mentioned in "Diary of a Madman" on page 29), and future Premier Zhou Enlai (1898-1976).
  • As he points out in the preface, Lu Xun's father was ill (with tuberculosis among other ailments), leaving his family to struggle.
  • He attended school, but did not prepare for imperial exams. This was a less prestigious route, but also an increasingly path for non-elites eager to gain access to formal schooling. He attended two military academies in Nanjing between the time of the Hundred Days’ Reform and the end of the Boxer Uprising, finding his way to Japan in time for the Russo-Japanese War. The image he mentions the preface is likely this one, below:
Picture
  • Literary career began by translating Japanese and Western stories (first collection in 1909). He was well versed both in classical Chinese literature as well as writing from Japan, Russia, Germany, and France.
  • He read a Japanese translation of Nikolai Gogol’s “Diary of a Madman,” the inspiration for his own story of the same name, depending on translation. Though inspired by a Russian story and modeled after
    Gogol’s own protest, there are distinct differences that separate the two works and exemplify
    the unique mindset of the Chinese people and the unique nature of their dilemma at this point
    in history. Stephen Owen, a scholar of Chinese literature, explains:
    • “Both [stories] are written in the form of a diary, and both depict the diarist’s descent into
      madness as a result of the oppressive systems in which they live. However, in Gogol’s
      story, as the diarist descends into madness, the diarist moves further away from truth and reality. In Lu Xun’s story, the diarist’s descent into madness brings him closer to truth
      and reality—the reality that the chaotic backwardness of Chinese society is chipping
      away the spirit of the Chinese people.”
  • Lu Xun’s cultural and political influence was significant. Mao Zedong viewed Lu Xun as “nothing less than the intellectual forefather of the Chinese Communist Revolution.” While Owen suggests that he “became the cornerstone of the New Culture Movement.”
  • He co-founded the League of Left-Wing Writers in 1930 and was mainly able to avoid the fierce factional politics within the left before his death in 1936 due to tuberculosis and other ailments.

Quotes and questions
  • Start by taking some time to pull out 1-2 significant, provocative, or perplexing quotations from the text. Pair each quotation with a question intended to engage your classmates.
  • We will use this this shared Google Doc (link) to collaborate.
  • These will be the selections and questions that we anchor our discussion around.

Lu Xun’s afterlife
  • View the posters on the “Lu Xun” page of Stefan Landsberger’s Chinese Posters (external link).
  • Discuss the following issues:
    • How is Lu Xun’s image being employed in each poster? How is that effect achieved?
    • If you were asked to draw up a poster on the theme of “Diary of a Madman” for the Chinese Communist Party, what might it look like?
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    • Archived Courses >
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            • In-Class >
              • The Death of Woman Wang
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            • JE Unit 4
            • JE Unit 5
            • JE Unit 6
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            • Research Schedule >
              • Checkpoint #2: Annotated Bibliography
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      • U.S. History >
        • Humanities History (2017-18) >
          • Course Information
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            • U5: Industry & Empire
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            • U7: Global Conflicts
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      • More Course Descriptions
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      • Analyzing Primary Sources with SOAPSTone
      • Analyzing Visual Primary Sources
      • Selecting & Evaluating Secondary Sources
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      • Historical Thinking Chart (PDF)
      • Breaking Down History with the SPICE Factors
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      • Evaluating Discussion
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      • Note Cards
    • Writing >
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      • Thesis Statements
      • Forming Counterarguments
      • Formatting Chicago-Style Papers
      • Ford Library Guide to Chicago-style Citations (PDF)
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