Course Outline for Chinese Political System

COURSE OUTLINE

Section I. Introduction

1. China in the Twentieth Century: Political  and social crises
2. Intellectual Discovery of the West 
3. Rise of Chinese Communism : From urban radicalism to peasant insurrection
4. Nationalism and revolution 
5. Explaining Chinese Revolution

Readings

Merle Goldman, Lee Ou-fan Lee,  An Intellectual History of Modern China, Cambridge University Press, 2002

Benjamin I. Schwartz,  Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1951.

Roger, Howard, Mao Tse-Tung and the Chinese People, New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1977

Tony Saich(ed.), The Rise to Power of the CCP : Documents and Analysis , Armonk, New York, M.E.Sharpe, 1996

Ssu-Yu Teng and John K. Fairbank (eds), China's Response to the West: A Documentary Survey 1839-1923, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1964.

C.A. Johnson,  Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power: The  Emergence of Revolutionary China, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962

Mark Selden, The Yenan Way in Revolutionary China, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1971.

Jean Chesneaux and others, China from the opium Wars to the 1911 Revolution

N. Harris, Mandate of Heaven : Marx and Mao in Modern China

Section II. Political process in post-revolutionary China

1. State and Socialist project: land reforms
2. Making China modern and the politics of mobilisational socialism
3. Conceptions of Equalities: Great Leal Forward and origins of Ideological Clashes 
4.  Mao Zedong and Cultural Revolution: Key concepts 
5. Critique of Chinese Socialism

Readings:

Stuart R. Schram, The Thought of Mao Tse- Tung, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989

Joel S. Migdal, Atul Kohli and Vivienne Shue (eds.), State Power and Social Forces: Domination and Transformation in the Third World, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Vivienne Shue, The Reach of the State; Sketches of the Chinese Body Politics, Stanford; Stanford University Press, 1988.

Joan Robinson, The Cultural Revolution in China, Great Britain: Penguin, 1969. 

Kam –yee Law (ed.), The Chinese Cultural Revolution Reconsidered : Beyond Purge and Holocaust, Palgrave: Macmillan, 2003

Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung , Vol.1,2, 3,4, Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1965.

Tony Saich and Hans Van de Van ( eds), New Perspectives on the Chinese Communist Revolution

Section III. Changing Institutional Forms and Government Structure

1. Communist Party of China: The new managerial elite
2. National People's Congress: Norm making under hegemony
3. Structure of the Chinese administrative system

Readings

Derek J. Waller, The Government and Politics of the People's Republic of China, London: Hutchinson & co. publishers LTD., 1973.

Tony Saich, Governance and Politics of China, New York: Palgrave, 2001.

Bruce J. Dickson, 'Integrating Wealth and Power in China:  The Communist Party's Embrace of the Private Sector', The China Quarterly,  2007.

Section IV. Chinese Politics in post-Mao China

1. Developmental state and Market Reforms : Origins of  gaige kaifang
2. Institutional Innovations : Local People's Congresses
3. Centre-Periphery Conflict : Ethnicity and Region

Readings:

Stuart R. Schram, 'Economics in Command: Ideology and Policy since the Third Plenum, 1979-84', The China Quarterly, No. 97-100, 1984.

Richard Baum, Burying Mao: Chinese Politics in the Age of Deng Xiaoping, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994.

Barrett L. McCormick and Jonathan Unger, China After Socialism : In the Footsteps of Eastern Europe or East Asia, USA:  M.E.Sharpe,  1996

Jean C. Oi, 'The Role of Local State in China's Transitional Economy', The China Quarterly, No. 144, December 1995  

Section V. Chinese debates on Key Political Ideas

Democracy ( minzhu )

Nationalism

Development