In the post-Mao era, debates among Chinese intellectuals about what kind of country China is, and should become, have persisted. Are China’s achievements best explained by socialism, by markets, by Confucian civilization, or by a strong state? Is constitutional democracy a universal value or a Western particularity? What role should China play in the world? This reading course introduces students to these debates through the voices of mainland Chinese intellectuals themselves, read in English translation.
Our main source is Reading the China Dream (readingthechinadream.com), an open-access project directed by historian David Ownby that translates and introduces texts by establishment intellectuals working in the People’s Republic of China. Following the site’s own “maps,” we move through the three main currents of contemporary Chinese thought — Liberals, the New Left, and New Confucians — before turning to cross-cutting themes: the Party and governance, tianxia and world order, and questions of gender, youth, technology, and ethnicity. Throughout, we read these texts not as simple reflections of state ideology but as interventions in a lively, constrained, and often contentious public sphere.
- Trainer/in: Man Zhang