Head image: Bing Xu, Book from the Sky
This course explores Chinese history through its vibrant popular culture—the myths, customs, media, and artistic expressions that inform daily life. Drawing on Raymond Williams, we examine “culture” as at once “a general process of intellectual, spiritual, and aesthetic development,” “the works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity,” and “a particular way of life, whether of a people, a period, or a group.” From stories like Journey to the West to contemporary internet phenomena, these cultural forms reveal the values and tensions within Chinese society as well as its broader global entanglements.
The course’s interdisciplinary approach combines cultural and historical analysis with critical engagement with primary sources, including films, music, literature, and visual arts. By examining themes such as religion, gender, revolution, and urbanization, students will investigate the ways in which cultural artifacts both mirror and shape collective memory, identity, and sociopolitical change. Through class discussions, collaborative presentations, and creative projects, students will develop analytical tools to assess cultural production as a relational process that connects aesthetics, ethics, and lived realities.
Course Instructor: Lu Liu (lliu422@gatech.edu)
Course offering: Maymester 2025 (NOW ASYNCHRONOUS!!), Fall 2025 (3:30-4:45 PM, Skiles 308)
Requirements for Spring 2025
- Attendance and participation 15%
- Weekly online posts 15%
- Group presentation 10%
- Individual presentation report 10%
- Website project 10%
- Co-creating the syllabus 5%
- Final project 35%
Semester schedule for Spring 2025
Week 1 (Jan 6-8) Introduction & Movie watching: Hero (2002)
No readings this week
Week 2 (Jan 13-15) Cultural Foundations
Selections from the Analects and Dao De Jing
Week 3 (Jan 20-22) Food Culture I
Note: no class on Jan 20, Martin Luther King’s Day
Edward Yang, “Dish, Rice or Noodle? The Changing Use of Chopsticks.”
E. N. Anderson, “Some Basic Cooking Strategies.”
Week 4 (Jan 27-29) Food Culture II
No reading or online post this week. Please start reading Monkey
Dumpling-making festival this week. Details TBA.
Week 5 (February 3-5) Mythology
Selections from Monkey by Wu Ch’eng-en, translated by Arthur Waley
Group Presentation 1: White Snake/白蛇 Baishe
Liang Luo, “Introduction to White Snake Legends,” “The Global White Snake as Digital Activist Project” https://mediaspace.illinois.edu/media/t/1_59xhjhmh/171192221
Week 6 (February 10-12) Art
Ruchard Barnhart, “Figure in Landscape”
Martin J. Powers, “When Is a Landscape Like a Body?”
Group Presentation 2: Calligraphy/书法 shufa
Kwo Da-Wei, “Flourishing Period,” “Aesthetic Roots,” “Aesthetic Components”
Group Presentation 3: Peking Opera/京剧 Jingju
Ruru Li, “Singing, Speaking, Dance-acting, and Combat; Mouth, Hands, Eyes, Body, and Steps – From Training to Performance in Beijing Opera (Jingju).”
Joshua Goldstein, “Mei Lanfang and the Nationalization of the Peking Opera, 1912-1930”
Week 7 (February 17-19) Gender
Susan Mann, Gender and Sexuality in Modern Chinese History, Chapters 2-3
Wu Yonggang, The Goddess (1934, screening in class)
Presentation 4: footbinding/缠足 chanzu
Dorothy Ko, Every Step a Lotus: Shoes for Bound Feet (selections), “Cinderella’s Dreams.”
Week 8 (February 24-26) Revolution I
Mao Zedong, “Talks at the Yan’an Forum of Art and Literature” (excerpts)
Choose one between Hung Chang-tai, “Tiananmen Square: Space and Politics” or Wu Hung, “Face of Authority: Tiananmen and Mao’s Tiananmen Portrait.”
Presentation 5: yangge/秧歌 (folk dancing)
Hung Chang-tai: “Yangge: Dance of Revolution”
Rose Martin and Ruohan Chen, “From Folk to on Mass Dance: The Emergence of Guangchang Wu”
Week 9 (March 3-5) Revolution II
Jiang Qing, “On the Revolution in Peking Opera”;
Students’ selection of one chapter form Xueping Zhong, Zheng Wang, and Bai Di, Some of Us: Chinese Women Growing Up in the Mao Era.
Red Detachment of Women (selections, screening in class)
Presentation 6: sent-down youth or educated youth/知青 zhiqing
Emily Honig and Xiaojian Zhao, “Sent-down Youth and Rural Economic Development in Maoist China”
Michel Bonnin, “Restricted, Distorted but Alive: The Memory of the “Lost Generation” of Chinese Educated Youth”
Week 10 (March 10-12)
No reading or online posts this week. Wednesday class is “asynchronous” to give you more time on the final project proposal and the Website Project
Hu Jie, Though I Am Gone (2006, screening in class)
Week 11 Have a Wonderful Spring Break!!!
Week 12 (March 24-26) Music
Andrew Jones, “The Politics of Popular Music in Post-Tiananmen China”
Wei-Hsin Lin, “Jay Chou’s Music and the Shaping of Popular Culture in China”
Selected songs by Teresa Teng, Cui Jian, Jay Chou, Ta-yu Lo, and Beyond.
Presentation 7: Chinese Hip Hop/说唱 shuochang
Jin Liu, “Language, identity and unintelligibility: A case study of the rap group Higher Brothers”
Michael Ka Chi Cheuk, “The Politics and Aesthetics of Featuring in Post-2017 Chinese Hip Hop,”
Week 13 (March 31-April 2) Urbanization
Zhou Hao, Chinese Mayor (2015)
Hao Jingfang, “Folding Beijing”
Presentation 8: urban villages/城中村 chengzhongcun
Buckingham, W. and Chan, K. W. “One City, Two Systems: Chengzhongcun in China’s Urban System.”
Tzu-Chi Ou, “Low-End Accumulation: Spatial Transformation and Social Stratification in a Beijing Urban Village”
Week 14 (April 7-9) Utopia and Dystopia
Zhang Meng, Piano in a Factory (2010, screening in class)
Ban Wang, “Dignity of Labor”
Jennifer Hubbert, “On Nostalgia and Returns”
Presentation 9: Li Ziqi/李子柒 (Chinese Internet Celebrity)
Tao Qian, “The Peach Blossom Spring.”
Dai, Wangyun. “How Li Ziqi Repackages Rural China for Urban Fantasies”
Limin Liang, “Consuming the Pastoral Desire: Li Ziqi, Food Vlogging and the Structure of Feeling in the Era of Microcelebrity”
Week 15 (April 14-16) Individual Meetings with the Professor
Week 16 (April 21) Individual Meetings with the Professor
Wednesday, April 30: Three-minute Thesis Presentation and End-of-semester celebration
