Modern China

Chapter 1, Part 1

Details on books discussed, and links to reliable reading about the themes.

Chapter 1, Part 2

Outline, reading links and short timeline for Chapter 1, Part 2 (China's population)

Part 3 of Lecture 1.

updated.

Last segment of Chapter 1.

Preliminary background for the last segment of this chapter.

The Nineteenth Century: 1796-1896

Chapter 2, Lecture 1 of the course.

Who Were the Last Emperors of China?

The challenges of governing a large territory in the early modern period explain many of the problems of communication and control in the nineteenth century.

This is the first of three parts of a lecture that will cover the Taiping War and the Muslim uprisings of the late 19th century.

"The Taiping War."  Part 3, "The Muslim Wave" will be posted June 4.

"The Muslim Wave," the final lecture of the "Rebel Nation" module of the second lecture, "The Nineteenth Century."

The last segment of Chapter 2. Chapter 3, the last chapter, begins with the next segment, "The Withering State."

This is the first section of Chapter 3, the final chapter of the course. It explores the problem of fracturing of central governance and emergence of regional government in the very late nineteenth century, creating China's profound early twentieth-century problem of entrenched local power and a weak or absent center.

This is the second section of Chapter 3 of the course. The last two sections will be "1949" and "2020."

This episode deals with the tumultuous 1950s, with an exclusive interview with writer Frank Dikotter (Mao's Great Famine).