Notice of summer session in July: Modern Chinese Studies

Package 12: Modern Chinese Studies: Shanghai in Eyewitnessof China’s Development.

a.      BriefIntroduction of the Package

Whilst China has been undergoing a series of significant changes and challenges since the 1840s, the pioneering role of Shanghai has always been a microcosm of China’s developmental process. Telling China Story, from the perspective of Shanghai, to the globe would largely reflect on sociocultural changes towards Sino-foreign conflicts, urban development, literature and life narratives etc. This package then combine the specialists from the School of Humanities in the fields of literature, history, geography in order to advance students’ understandings of how China marches into the twentieth-first century.

b.     Assessment

Performance and engagement in class, 60%; Fieldwork Report or Course Dissertation, 40%

c.      Prerequisites to attend this program

A basic knowledge of Chinese culture and language.

d.     Suggest Reading

Bergere, M., Shanghai:Chinas Gateway to Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009;

Fairbank, JohnKing, China: New History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992;

Huang, Yunte, Charlie Chan:The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with AmericanHistory, W. W .Norton & Company, 2010;

Wasserstrom, J. N., GlobalShanghai 1850-2010: A History in Fragments. London: Routledge, 2009;

Wakeman,Frederic, Policing Shanghai, 1927-1937,California, 1995.

e.      Course Arrangement:

This package of programme is consisted of introductive, lecturing and fieldwork sessions with a continuous focus on literature, geography and history of modern China and Shanghai. The introductive session, delivered by the specialists of the three fields altogether, aims to build up a sound knowledge of how student could approach modern China’s development through the eyes of Shanghai. The lecturing session is then separated into disciplinary focuses.

“Shanghai literature and modern Chinese culture”chooses Eileen Chang, PaiHsien-yung (Taipei People) and Wang Anyi(The Song of Everlasting Sorrow)respectively as three examples for 1940s, post-1949 Taiwan memory and 1990s, to explore the complicated but charming entanglement of women and war, past and present, old and new in Shanghai and China in general.

As the title says, “Overseas Chinese and Chinese Sojourners in the Global Community”targets on the overseas Chinese people, especially the labor emigrants, Charlie Chan in Shanghai and Nien Cheng in her Life and Death in Shanghai with some critical analyses.

The controversial and conflicting representation of the images of Chinese people will be discussed in this section. ‘War and Modern China, 1842-1949’ with a focus on how Sino-foreign conflicts opened the Shanghai port in 1842 to how Sino-Japanese conflicts changed the city of Shanghai from 1932-1945, illustrates the functional changes of Shanghai’s role in China in the past 170 years.

The subjects of the fieldwork session, ranging from Nanxiang steamed dumplings to Shikumen buildings, give students a fresh and vivid impression of Shanghai’surban living style, and with the lecturing of Shanghai’s urban geography, students would immerse themselves into this colourful city of China.

Introductionof Instructors:

Ding Yannan

Assistant Professor，Ph.Din Geography, KU Leuven.

Research areas: Humanities Geography, Urban History

Guo Liandong

Associate Research Fellow, Ph.D in Modern Chinese Literature, Fudan University.

Research areas: Modern Chinese Literature, Comparative Literature and World Literature, Inter-Cultural Communication

Liu Jialin

Professor, Ph.D in Comparative Literature and World Literature, Nanjing University.

Research areas:Comparative Literature and World Literature, Life Writing and Translation

Wang Yunxia

Associate Professor, Ph.D in Modern Chinese literature, Wuhan University.

Research areas: Comparative Literature and World Literature, Modern Chinese Literature

Chang Chih-yun

Distinguished research fellow, Ph.Din History, University of Bristol.

Research areas:History of Sino-Foreign Relations, History of Imperialism and Colonialism, and Historical Geography Information System

f.       Contact:

Project Head: Prof. Liu Jialin, Email: leoliu65@sjtu.edu.cn

Project Coordinators：Ms. Liu Jingjing, Email: liujingjing@sjtu.edu.cn; Ms. Zhou Qiangwei, Email: rose_zhou@sjtu.edu.cn

2016 SJTU International Summer Session.pdf