Note: The course content is arranged for the full 18-week semester. Each week contains one section for three hours.

2/23 Week 1: Course Overview

3/2 Week 2: Economic Development

• Studwell, Joe. 2013. How Asia Works: Success and Failure in the World’s Most Dynamic Region. New York: Grove Press.

3/9 Week 3: Inequality

• Solinger, Dorothy J., ed. 2019. Polarized Cities: Portraits of Rich and Poor in Urban China. Lanham, Maryland?; London: Rowman & Littlefield.

Supplementary readings:

• Harms, Erik. 2016. “Urban Space and Exclusion in Asia.” Annual Review of Anthropology 45 (1): 45–61. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-102215-100208.


• Cho, Mun Young. 2013. The Specter of the People?: Urban Poverty in Northeast China. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.


• Woronov, Terry. 2015. Class Work: Vocational Schools and China’s Urban Youth. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

3/16 Week 4: Precarity

• Allison, Anne. 2013. Precarious Japan. Durham: Duke University Press.

Supplementary readings:

• Song, Jesook. 2014. Living on Your Own?: Single Women, Rental Housing, and Post-Revolutionary Affect in Contemporary South Korea. Albany, NY, USA: State University of New York Press. http://site.ebrary.com/lib/alltitles/docDetail.action?docID=10847978.


• Hinkson, Melinda. 2017. “Precarious Placemaking.” Annual Review of Anthropology 46 (1): 49–64. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-102116-041624.

3/23 Week 5: Anxiety

• Zhang, Li. 2020. Anxious China: Inner Revolution and Politics of Psychotherapy. First edition. Oakland, California: University of California Press. 

3/30 Week 6: Encounters

• Siu, Helen F., and Mike McGovern. 2017. “China-Africa Encounters: Historical Legacies and Contemporary Realities.” Annual Review of Anthropology 46 (1).


• Lee, Ching Kwan. 2017. The Specter of Global China: Politics, Labor, and Foreign Investment in Africa. Chicago?; London: University Of Chicago Press.

Supplementary readings:

• Appel, Hannah. 2019. The Licit Life of Capitalism: US Oil in Equatorial Guinea. Durham?; London: Duke University Press.

4/6 Week 7: China Factor 1

• Guest lecturer: Jieh-min Wu


• Fong, Brian C. H., Jieh-min Wu, and Andrew J. Nathan, eds. 2020. China’s Influence in the Centre-Periphery Tug of War in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Indo-Pacific. 1st Edition. Abingdon, Oxon?; New York, NY: Routledge. 

4/13 Week 8: China Factor 2

• Guest lecturer: TBD 

4/20 Week 9: Midterm week. No Class.

• Guest lecturer: TBD

4/27 Week 10: China Factor 3

• Guest lecturer: TBD

5/4 Week 11: China Factor 4

• Guest lecturer: TBD

5/11 Week 12: Information War

• Wang, Austin Horng-En, Mei-chun Lee, Min-Hsuan Wu, and Puma Shen. 2020. “Influencing Overseas Chinese by Tweets: Text-Images as the Key Tactic of Chinese Propaganda.” Journal of Computational Social Science 3 (2): 469–86.

Supplementary readings:

• Boyer, Dominic. 2013. The Life Informatic: Newsmaking in the Digital Era. Expertise. Cultures and Technologies of Knowledge. Ithaca?; London: Cornell University Press.


• Zuboff, Shoshana. 2020. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Illustrated edition. New York: Public Affairs.


• Mullaney, Thomas S., Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks, and Kavita Philip, eds. 2021. Your Computer Is on Fire. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.

5/18 Week 13: Political Mobilization

• Sopranzetti, Claudio. Owners of the Map: Motorcycle Taxi Drivers, Mobility, and Politics in Bangkok. Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2018.

5/25 Week 14: US Pork Imports

• Blanchette, Alex. 2020. Porkopolis: American Animality, Standardized Life, and the Factory Farm. Durham: Duke University Press.

6/1 Week 15: Commodity Chains

• Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

6/8 Week 16: Environment

• Teaiwa, Katerina Martina. 2014. Consuming Ocean Island: Stories of People and Phosphate from Banaba. Illustrated edition. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

6/15 Week 17: Final Paper

6/22 Week 18: Wrap up

TBA

(30%) Weekly Discussion Questions and Participation

Based on your reading of the assigned texts, submit a discussion question each week by 12 pm on Monday before the class.

(30%) Midterm  paper                                                         

(40%) Take-Home Final Paper

"What's a discussion question?"

Think of a discussion question as your chance to open up a conversation with your peers. It should not demand knowledge beyond the readings and it should not produce a simple yes/no answer. Rather, it pursues clarification or exploration by posing a question that takes you deeper into the text. Not every discussion question has a clear answer—most don’t—nor do most take a debate format (i.e., posing contrasting positions and asking people to argue them). Most discussion questions can be posed in a sentence but might require an additional sentence or two of explication, contextualization or follow-up. Also, it is helpful to refer to specific keywords or page numbers to guide fellow readers to key passages in the texts or ideas raised in lecture.   

• Fong, Brian C. H., Jieh-min Wu, and Andrew J. Nathan, eds. 2020. China’s Influence in the Centre-Periphery Tug of War in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Indo-Pacific. 1st Edition. Abingdon, Oxon?; New York, NY: Routledge.