Session #3 - February 16

[Johnny Walker]

As I'm looking back on my notes from our discussion concerning the Great Firewall, I'm also brainstorming ways in which to teach about contemporary China as well as review past content for my AP Modern World History course. I loved hearing the anecdote about a Chinese student whose subversive poem was published by the People's Daily following Tianenmen even though by reading the characters diagonally called for the President to resign. I was thinking about engaging students in discussions about how they subvert or go around our own school's internet censorship and blocked sites. And, I'm interested in seeing how students would feel about a government collecting data and tracking their movements as opposed to engaging willingly a private app that they regularly give their data. A couple of years ago, I used an article about Peppa Pig being banned in order to introduce the power of the Chinese government and relate it to the demonstrations of 1989. We also studied Stalin's erasing of people he had purged in photographs and official history, and we related the modern historical cleansing methods that erase Tiananmen within China to the more rudimentary Soviet attempts.  If anyone has any good media, film or articles about Tiananmen Square, I'd really appreciate you sharing them. I was surprised to hear during our discussion, how the democracy movement was not just restricted to students in Beijing, but included journalists and other sectors of society outside of the capital.

I'm considering China's historic concern of balancing protection from and engaging with the outside world. Whether it was restricting foreign merchants to walled-off ports, walling-off and defending from Mongols, or restricting foreign penetration of the minds of its citizens on the internet, China seems to have a continuing pattern of successfully stemming and restricting the flow of outside influence until that deluge becomes overwhelming. Whether that influence has been Mongol, Manchurian, European, Soviet or American, China seems to first control those forces until being overwhelmed and then imprinted upon by those outside elements. In just using language of "flow" and "deluge", I similarly think of China's experience with nature itself. From The Great Canal to the Three Gorges, China's relationship with shaping its environment relates to massive forces that can be managed and harnessed as monolithic engines for power, economic growth and sustainability, yet casts an ever-present and looming shadow of potential threat to stability. 

[Johnny Walker]

I really enjoyed the "Growing Rice" video. Not only does it provide soothing sounds of nature and pastoral views of a beautiful village and countryside, but it allows me to especially appreciate the continuities in Chinese peasant-life. To see that this kind of agriculture is still done by hand as well as seeing the importance of clean water as a vital natural resource is a continuity that has existed for centuries. Our class learned about the significant effect of the introduction of champa rice to China in our first unit, and to see this example here is fascinating. I would ask my students to identify such continuities as well as changes (e.g. western style clothing).  The website for the full film, "Watermarks" delves into contrasting scapes of an industrial park, crowded cities, and a drought-stricken northern village.  It seems like a great resource for students to witness the contradictions, beauty and challenges of Chinese life. https://gobetweenfilms.com/en/films/watermarks-2013/

[Johnny Walker]

Based on the lecture in this lesson, I checked out Chan, Madsen, and Unger's book, "Chen Village: Under Mao and Deng." It is organized into sections within chapters that are excellent to use for high school students for a shorter reading assignment. Whether you'd like to use it to illuminate "struggle sessions" following the revolution or illustrate the division of labor within peasant villages, the writing is clear and accessible. Also, the photographs and captions are provocative and informative such as a black and white image of a young boy holding a baby which is captioned, "Storage Room: Children regularly are left in charge of their younger siblings."  I'm sharing an excerpt that reflects a skill we are exploring in sourcing a document concerning the limitations of perspective and historic memory. Here's an example of text that I scanned where the author accounts for the differing memories of the state and reputation of the village of younger villagers and older former residents of the village, "Tales of the Chen Lineage," that I plan to share with my students 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_NX2dIF22MbtlFlKBaYleKLA_HS-WtIA/view?usp=sharing

[Johnny Walker]

Jonathon, Since I'm teaching AP Modern World for the first time this year, I've been feeling quite overwhelmed with the increased breadth of content. I taught AP European History for the past seven years, which went into greater depth. However, I chose not to teach or spend time on the Taiping Rebellion largely because it was not highlighted to a great extent on the standards. But, like you mention, it was the world's deadliest civil war! Even using the word, "rebellion" to describe it seems inappropriate in its descriptive scope. I'm curious about how the Taiping Rebellion fits into the Chinese collective consciousness. Is it taught in the same way that the US Civil War is taught in the scope of our history? Would you say it was one of the first death rattles of the Dynastic system? I'm looking forward to studying this period in greater detail. If you have any resources that have been especially valuable to your understanding, I'd love to hear about them. There are so many strange charismatic characters like Hong Xiuquan. And, the stories of American mercenaries like Frederick Townsend Ward are similarly mindblowing stories. It's a shame there isn't simply an AP Asian History or AP East Asian History course (like AP European History) in order to spend more time with our students to delve deeper into these discussions.

[Johnny Walker]

Jonathan, I agree that the Chinese government's social control over the family is a strange seeming contradiction to its relaxation of other economic controls. I've been thinking about how the Communist Party has shifted alliances from the rural peasants to the wealthier urbanites in the last fifty years. Because peasants drove the revolution, the Communist Party's early policies seemed to appeal to the peasant population in terms of promising greater collective security through protection from foreign invasion, but also through programs that allowed for greater dignity such as abolishing feudalism and landlord exploitation. Likewise, the 1978 turning point in a post Mao China, the Communist Party seems to support the power and prestige of those who live in the urban areas to a greater extent than the rural peasantry. In fact, the hukou system places the rural peasantry in a state of subservience and lower status to the city dwellers. These shifts in the Communist Party's priorities and beneficiaries of their programs from rural peasant families to urban bourgeoisie seems like a major contradictory shift in ideology. Or, I guess I could argue that the Communist Party has simply exploited the peasantry since the beginning- first to establish power and now to maintain it. So rather than think about the Chinese people as a monolithic group, I'm curious to examine how the regional and class differences among Chinese people relate to differing social, political, and economic opportunities and exploitations over time.

[Jonathan Alami]

Ray, I’m glad you brought up fast food chains such as McDonald’s and Starbucks in China. The rapid growth of the fast food industry in China since the 1990s is remarkable and is yet another example of China’s transformation from a state controlled economy to a free market system. I think showing students the statistics about the number of locations of KFC, McDonalds, and Starbucks in China in 1990 and 2017 will definitely be a great way to start a discussion about globalization and international relations between the United States and China. 

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