PS 404 - Seminar: Politics of Resistance in Contemporary China

(3.00 cr.)

China's historic economic growth since the early 1980s has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and, at the same time, created huge discontent inside the country. What are the possibilities, limits, and future of collective contention in China today? Although the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is ruled by an authoritarian single party-state, citizens, farmers, students, workers, and others have devised multiple strategies to make their collective voices heard, often outside official channels of political participation. This course aims to get a sense of the rapidly emerging field of collective resistance in China by surveying recent scholarship on protestors of all types in the early twenty-first century. Whether China will face a large-scale revolution similar to the one that brought the CCP to power or whether it will repeatedly endure small-scale protests that act as "pressure valves" to release the frustration is an open question. GT (Fall only) (Even Years)