Following are three numbered topics. Choose one.

1. Meanings of the modern
Modern Chinese cities have experienced three main stages of development, namely, republican, socialist, and postsocialist. What kind of modern city does each stage envision? Do certain features of a modern city in one stage continue into another stage? Do certain features discontinue across the stages? Please use specific examples to demonstrate the continuity and discontinuity of the meanings of the modern in the development of Chinese cities.

2. Individual urban experience
Modern Chinese cities are not only planned and defined by official ideologies and historical archives. They are also lived through by individuals. Please draw the narratives from Lin Hai-yin’s Memories of Peking, Jiang Wen’s In the heat of the sun, and Zhang Yang’s Shower (optional) to elaborate how modern cities could be experienced by individuals in their everyday life.

3. Failed modern cities?
In the century-long development of modern Chinese cities, modernization projects are proposed one after another, and cities are also transformed one after another. What ideals of modernization do those projects or cities attempt to bring into reality? Are they successful or not? Do they fail in certain aspects? Please use specific examples to discuss the merits and demerits of the modern project.

This is NOT a research paper. The only sources you are allowed to use are at least THREE of the assigned readings plus ONE outside source. This outside source could be a book mentioned in the lecture, a video clip showed in class, or a related material you find via the course’s LibGuides (will provide separately)