This course explores Chinese history through its vibrant popular culture—the myths, customs, media, and artistic expressions that inform daily life. Rather than treating culture as a static inheritance, we examine its dynamic and multifaceted nature, where tradition and modernity intersect, contest, and reimagine each other. From timeless stories like Journey to the West to contemporary internet phenomena, these cultural forms reveal not only the values and tensions within Chinese society but also its broader global entanglements. Students will engage with these topics to uncover how popular culture evolves as a site of resistance, adaptation, and creativity.

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. By the end of the semester, participants will be encouraged to think critically about their own positions in relation to the global flows of culture and ideas that shape the modern world.