PLSI-3366 Governance and Public Policy in Contemporary China

This course covers most significant issues of contemporary policies and public policy in China. It explores the forces changing the lives of nearly a fifth of humanity, the 1.1 billion people of China. This course is designed to be experimental in both subject and teaching methodology. In order to explore the political, economic, and social processes of liberalization that have created this new era of the increased circulation of people, ideas, commodities and technologies across national boundaries, seminar participants must use materials and methods from many scholarly disciplines and traditions: urban studies, political science, sociology, history, anthropology, economics, and media/cultural studies. In order to study these increasingly mobile populations that often fall outside the boundaries of conventional area studies approaches, students must develop innovative comparative case study and survey methodologies. (Also listed as CHIN 3366, URBS 3366)