East Asian Civilizations
I. The first section will consist of IDs. You will be asked to identify and comment upon the significance of 6 out of 8 names and terms drawn from the following list.
- March 1st Movement
- Kim Il Sung
- Ito Hirobumi
- Syngman Rhee
- Zaibatsu
- Pan-Asianism
- Hirohito
- 1911 Revolution
- May 4th Movement
- Russo-Japanese War
- Manchurian Incident
- Chiang Kai-shek Manchukuo
- Long March
- Mao Zedong
- First Five-Year Plan
- Great Leap Forward
- Deng Xiaoping
- Article Nine
- Douglas Macarthur
II. For the second section you will be asked to answer two essay questions, one of which (#1) will be required. I will select two of the questions from #s 2-5, and you are to answer one of them. Your answers should be well written and organized, address the question or questions, and display your knowledge of the material to its fullest. (35 points each)
1. Compare the post-1950 experiences of two East Asian countries (China, Japan, Korea). Whether you focus on political history, the economy, society, or something else is up to you, but your answer should address the question of how they have developed or otherwise changed over the past sixty years. If you choose Korea as one of the countries, you can focus on either North or South Korea, or on all of Korea. You may not, however, simply compare North and South Korea.
2. Describe the March 1st and May 4th Movements and compare the roles played by these movements in the histories of their respective countries.
3. Recount the history of the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945 (part of World War II) and evaluate the roles played by the Nationalists, Communists, and Americans in opposing the Japanese.
4. Describe the histories of East Asia (China, Japan and Korea) from 1945 to 1951 and analyze the ways in which events in each of those countries influenced those in the region generally.
5. My Old Home and Lost Names are both first person accounts set in early 20th century rural East Asia, though of course the former is a fictional short story about China and the latter a memoir about Korea. With those differences in mind, compare the two in terms of the central issues raised by the two accounts and the ways in which they reflect the historical conditions of Nationalist China and Korea under the Japanese.