Modern Chinese Thoughts

This course is designed for graduate students either in their master or doctoral program. The length of the course is a whole academic year. The length of each session is two hours. The goal and the purpose of this course are to discuss the change and development of intellectual thought of China since the Opium War (1840). From the self-improvement era to the constitution period and to the revolution age, they all carried a different degree of reviewing and appraisal on Chinese traditional culture. Down to the May-Forth Movements of 1919, a debate on the values between the Chinese and the Western culture emerged. During this particular era, discussion and debates rouse in swarms, and the passion was unceasing.
Kang You-Wei will be chosen as the core of the discussion for the first semester; Hu-Shih will be the main figure for discussion in the second semester. The main reference books will be the writing from Kang You-Wei and Hu Shih. In the meanwhile, the writing from the representative figures of the same time period, such as Liang Chi-Chao, Tan Si-Tong, Chang Bing-Lin, Liu Shih-Pei, Chen Du-Shiu, Liang Shu-Ming, will be also chosen as the reference material.
The grading will mainly be based upon students’ performance in class and their term papers.