The China Boom: The Historical Routes of China’s Current Economic Dynamism

In this course we will look backward into Chinese history to the mid-19th century through the series of essayist portraits of prominent officials, intellectuals, reformers and revolutionaries (Wei Yuan, Feng Guifen, the Empress Dowager, Liang Qichao, Sun Yat-sen, Chen Duxiu, Chiang Kai-shek, Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Zhu Rongji, and Liu Xiaobo). Our goal will be to better understand how China, once “the sick man of Asia” managed to reincarnate itself in the 1980s to become the economic powerhouse of today. Using intellectual and politically history as seen through the lives and works of these iconic Chinese thinkers and activists, we will seek to delineate the singular evolutionary pattern that, contrary to all western developmental theories, enabled China to transform itself into the superpower that it has become.