Course Description

This is not a textbook-history course. It is a course about flesh-and-blood people living in the many real worlds of modern China: a classical opera performer follows his tragic destiny; a young college student is conflicted between loyalty to her country and her erotic passion for a traitor; two characters search for their significant others in a small village that is going to be destroyed by the construction of a dam, the symbol of modern progress in China.

Instead of being a passive spectator, you will be brought inside the personal worlds and conflicts of human beings struggling to survive in a country invaded by foreigners, wracked by civil war, seduced by modernity.