Essay Guidelines
Paper Length: 10 pages
Requirements:
The essay should be both descriptive and analytical. Accordingly you should do two things:
1. provide a brief historical and/or descriptive account of the issue you wish to address. Who are the people/culture/region involved? What time period(s) are you looking at and why? What are the issues involved? What does this particular topic tell us about Chinese society or culture(s)?
2. Relate some aspect of the topic you are looking at to at least one of the key issues we discussed in the course. This means you must discuss how your topic connects to this issue, and how your paper supports or refutes a particular approach or idea used in the course. Again, the syllabus can give you some ideas. If you have questions, please come and see me.
The paper must contain some sort of referencing system, or the writer must be able to formally present his or her source material in a way that discusses the nature of the source material and the writer's own assessment of the validity or otherwise of the source.
The format of the paper will be a research paper. Other formats are possible with permission of the instructor but in all cases the paper must address the three areas described above in 1) - 2).
Paper topics are OPEN, but the paper must address some aspect of modern Chinese cultures directly. Your paper MUST include analytical sources, use the proper rules of argument and evidence and be clear, and well-written. It is thus MORE RIGOROUS than the blog posts in terms of the demands I will place on you.
Students are encouraged to use at least one article from the readings even if it is to point out the differences or disadvantages of using this particular excerpt as a way to understand a particular issue. All other sources (5 minimum) must be scholarly and/or analytical, except when you are quoting from news reports, social media posts or other expressions of OPINION as evidence that people hold particular views.
NB: You cannot simply quote any source as if it were true. You need to provide evidence. This goes ESPECIALLY for official sources whether from the Chinese government or other government sources (eg US government/VOA etc), and ALSO for external media sources such as Fox News, Wall St Journal or the New York Times.
By and large, I will NOT accept sources that are unsupported. Essays that rely on unsupported data will be graded down.
Some examples of essay topics include the following.
China's occupation of Tibet: Is colonialism a useful concept?
What is the significance of Yan et al.'s notion of a ""moral crisis" in modern China?
The social, economic and cultural uses of food in modern China
Sexuality in modern China
The rise in visibility of gay and lesbian activism in China
The history of Uygur nationalism in the People's Republic of China
How have modern Chinese films framed and critiqued notions of nation and individual rights?
Social media and activism in modern China
Hong Kong as part of China: cultural and political issues
The positive and negative roles of government in the environmental crisis in China.