Program for Teaching East Asia



Resources for Teaching about China's Transformation on the Eve of the Olympics

Colorado Council for the Social Studies, April 11, 2008
Jon Zeljo, Assistant Director, and Jenny Spolnik, Outreach Coordinator

Overview

The complexities and challenges of China today require resources to tap into Olympic preparations and news coverage to explore and examine modern China's transformations. Key issues that create a lens for us to analyze these transformations include the economy, media literacy, the Olympics, the environment, democracy, and Tibet and recent human rights issues.

General Links

Economy

China is a major player in the world's economy and has been experiencing an unprecedented boom internally. Will the economic miracle last?

  • International Monetary Fund

    • China's Approach to Reform - www.imf.org
      Some amazing things are going on in China right now. Cities are changing beyond recognition in just a few years, or even in a few months. Rapid industrialization is attracting hundreds of millions of peasants to the cities seeking employment - around the traditional Lunar New Year Festival, they pack train and bus stations to head home to see their relatives. And China is integrating rapidly with the rest of the world.

    • China's Export Boom - www.imf.org
      Over the past 15 years, China's exports have jumped more than tenfold, far exceeding the tripling of world trade that has taken place over the same period. As a result, in 2004, China overtook Japan as the world's third largest exporter, just behind Germany and the United States. Not surprisingly, this growth has attracted a lot of attention among media, academia, and policymakers.

    • China's Growing External Dependence
      Rapidly growing foreign trade has been key to China's remarkable economic performance of the past three decades, yet the conventional view is that China's growth has been largely domestically driven. According to this view, China uses its abundant labor to assemble imported inputs into low-tech consumer goods and capital goods exports, making it the world's workshop.

    • China's Rebalancing Act
      In the past 20 years, China has added about $2 trillion to world GDP, created 120 million new jobs, and pulled 400 million people out of poverty. These are big numbers - equivalent to adding a country of the economic size of Portugal every year; creating as many new jobs each year as the total number of people employed in Australia; and eradicating poverty in Ethiopia, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Zambia combined.

    • Solving China's Rebalancing Puzzle
      Over the past year, observers of the global economic scene have been treated to a rare spectacle, as a host of U.S. cabinet-level officials and their Chinese counterparts sat down in a much-touted series of meetings under the banner of the "U.S.-China Economic Dialogue." The official program covers a long list of topics, including market access, intellectual property rights, U.S. export controls, and investment guarantees; however, it is safe to say that the real agenda is the ever-present U.S. bilateral trade deficit with China and the mainland's burgeoning trade surplus with the world at large.
  • China's Widening Income Gap, Business Week
    As the National People's Congress prepares to meet in early March for its annual policy-setting meeting, economic and social issues are looming large in China, and one overshadows the rest: the mainland's widening income gap. In both the state press and the independent blogosphere, the media are abuzz with reports on just how serious the problem has become.

  • Shanghai Builds for the Future
    And the description is: China is now undergoing one of the most massive urbanization in human history, and nowhere is that more evident than in cosmopolitan Shanghai. The city's population is now almost 18 million, and is forecast to rise to 25 million by 2020. This series looks at how the city is preparing for its future.

Media Literacy

Media Literacy is the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, and create media in a variety of forms. It builds an understanding of the role of media in society as well as essential skills of inquiry and self-expression necessary for citizens of a democracy. (Center for Media Literacy)

  • China from the Inside PBS website: www.pbs.org/chinainside
    • How is the story told?
    • How does the documentary genre impact the way the film is understood or "read?"
    • What other devices are used to tell the story?
    • How does the narrator convince us of the accuracy of the account?
    • Could the story have been told differently?

  • BBC China country profile and in-depth coverage
    The BBC is the largest broadcasting corporation in the world. Its purpose is to enrich people's lives with programmes that inform, educate and entertain. It is a public service broadcaster, established by a Royal Charter and funded by the licence fee that is paid by UK households.
    The BBC uses the income from the licence fee to provide services including 8 national TV channels plus regional programming, 10 national radio stations, 40 local radio stations and an extensive website.

  • KQED Education Network
    KQED Education Network inspires learning and enriches communities through the power of media. EdNet, KQED's education and outreach division, works to ensure that programs have a life beyond broadcast, extending the impact of KQED's resources into the community through a range of media-making opportunities, workshops, teacher trainings, public forums and community events.

  • KQED Media Literacy Project
    This project offers support to teachers and educators across disciplines to encourage students to think critically about the powerful images, words and sounds which saturate contemporary culture. Media literacy is the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, and create media in a variety of forms.

  • Center for Media Literacy
    A pioneer in its field, the Center for Media Literacy (CML) is an educational organization that provides leadership, public education, professional development and educational resources nationally. Dedicated to promoting and supporting media literacy education as a framework for accessing, analyzing, evaluating and creating media content, CML works to help citizens, especially the young, develop critical thinking and media production skills needed to live fully in the 21st century media culture.

  • Media Awareness Network
    Resources and support for everyone interested in media and information literacy for young people.

Olympics/ Olympic-related Issues

As China hosts the 2008 Olympics, it is put on the world stage, magnifying the issues burdening the country's image.

  • The Official Website of the 2008 Beijing Olympics
    As the Olympic torch has traveled to San Francisco, the city is extending its arms to embrace the flame with pride, emotions and courage. With the world looking on to the sixth leg of the torch relay around the world, the flame, a symbol of Olympic unity, received VIP treatment as it arrived early Tuesday morning.

  • Official Website of the Olympic Movement
    The Games have always brought people together in peace to respect universal moral principles. The upcoming Games will feature athletes from all over the world and help promote the Olympic spirit.

  • Bejing Tourism Administration
    Beijing lies in the north of the North China Plain. It neighbors the Tianjin Municipality in the east, and borders Hebei Province on three sides-the north, west and south. The terrain of the Beijing area slopes from the northwest to the southeast.

  • Pictograms of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games
    The pictograms of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games integrate pictographic charm of inscriptions on bones and bronze objects in ancient China with simplified embodiment of modern graphics.

  • NBC Olympics | Games of the XXIX Olympiad, Beijing China
    China was aglow as it paused preparations at the one-year mark from hosting its first Olympics. What will the 2008 Beijing Games mean to the world's most populous nation? Alan Abrahamson looks ahead.

  • Reporters sans frontières - Beijing 2008
    When the International Olympic Committee assigned the 2008 summer Olympic Games to Beijing on 13 July 2001, the Chinese police were intensifying a crackdown on subversive elements, including Internet users and journalists. Six years later, nothing has changed. But despite the absence of any significant progress in free speech and human rights in China, the IOC's members continue to turn a deaf ear to repeated appeals from international organisations that condemn the scale of the repression.

  • Olympic Dreams and Nightmares, The Nation
    Fifteen years ago, many thought China's Communist Party was on its last legs--and few imagined it would soon welcome capitalists into its ranks. Then, as an example of a failed Olympics prediction, consider the Los Angeles Times story that claimed Chinese excitement over sports had reached "such a pitch" that within a short time--"perhaps only a few Olympiads"--Beijing would be "the scene of the world's Olympics." Not a bad prediction, if it had been made in 1984 or even 1964. But the story ran July 20, 1914.

  • History News Network: Books for the Beijing Bound
    Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom is a Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine, a frequent contributor to newspapers (such as the Los Angeles Times) and magazines (such as Newsweek International), and the author, most recently, of China's Brave New World - And Other Tales for Global Times (2007).

  • China Books - America's #1 Source of Publications About China Since 1960.
    China Books & Periodicals, Inc. is America's largest and oldest distributor of books, periodicals and other cultural products from China. Since 1960, they have been a main source for publications in the fields of literature, history, political science, language, the arts, and many others for millions of Americans who want to know more about one of the world's oldest civilizations.

  • Beijing Olympics 2008 : China Digital Times (CDT)
    As the Olympic torch procession fought its way through protesters in London and Paris on its way to Wednesday's leg in San Francisco, Chinese men in blue-and-white tracksuits guarded the flame, at times shoving away people who tried to get too close.
    The guards appear to be members of the Beijing Olympic Games Sacred Flame Protection unit, a detachment of personnel from China's People's Armed Police.

  • Darfur collides with Olympics, and China yields - International Herald Tribune
    For the past two years, China has protected the Sudanese government as the United States and Britain have pushed for United Nations Security Council sanctions against Sudan for the violence in Darfur. But in the past week, strange things have happened. A senior Chinese official, Zhai Jun, traveled to Sudan to push the Sudanese government to accept a United Nations peacekeeping force.

  • Foreign Policy: The Battle of Beijing
    You can always count on the Olympic Games to provide drama. Next year's games in Beijing will be no different; they too will produce powerful stories and riveting television. But this time the images will not just be athletes overcoming the odds or breaking records. They will also focus on the clashes between the Chinese police and the activists who will arrive from all around the world.

  • Thirsty Dragon at the Olympics - The New York Review of Books
    The picture on this web site was taken by a People's Pictorial photographer in 1953. The sixty-year-old Mao Zedong had just finished writing a calligraphic inscription that read "Celebrate the successful completion of the Guanting Reservoir Project."

  • Smog and Mirrors: China's Plan for a Green Olympics
    Double-digit economic growth is something you can actually see in the capital city of the People's Capitalist Republic of China. Every 24 hours, another thousand new Buicks, cute little homegrown Cherys, and buff black Audis swarm onto the 10-lane parking lots that ring the city.

  • Olympic artist attacks China's pomp and propaganda | Art & Architecture | Guardian Unlimited Arts
    The Chinese artist behind Beijing's spectacular new Olympic stadium has said he wants nothing to do with the propaganda for which it will be used during next year's games.
    In an attack on the "disgusting" political conditions in the one-party state, Ai Weiwei told the Guardian he would not attend the opening ceremony a year from now, or allow himself to be associated with either the government or the games.

  • The Official Mascots of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games
    Like the Five Olympic Rings from which they draw their color and inspiration, Fuwa will serve as the Official Mascots of Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, carrying a message of friendship and peace -- and good wishes from China -- to children all over the world. Designed to express the playful qualities of five little children who form an intimate circle of friends, Fuwa also embody the natural characteristics of four of China's most popular animals -- the Fish, the Panda, the Tibetan Antelope, the Swallow -- and the Olympic Flame.

  • China's Olympic Warmup - TIME
    Beijing is boiling. A year before China's capital hosts the 2008 Summer Olympic Games, its economy is swelling at an annual rate of 12%. Skyscrapers and vast shopping malls are springing up alongside the 28 million new trees that have been planted in an attempt to counteract the 3 million vehicles that clog the city's streets and whose fumes contribute to pollution so bad that new arrivals invariably develop a racking cough that can plague them for months.

  • Stefan Landsberger's Chinese Propaganda Poster Pages--Beijing Olympics 2008
    On 13 July 2001, the International Olympic Committee voted for Beijing to host the Olympics in 2008. This decision ended a period of intense lobbying, in which at one point the Chinese government stated that hosting the Olympics constituted a human right for the Chinese people. China's candidacy met with fierce opposition from various quarters. The country's human rights record in particular was mentioned most often as a reason for not honoring Beijing.

  • Washington Post

    • Gray Wall Dims Hopes of 'Green' Games - washingtonpost.com
      October 16, 2007 - In summer, a gray industrial haze coats this city of more than 15 million, descending over the Great Wall, sticking to humid hillsides and obscuring skyscrapers. Soaring temperatures and a lack of wind conspire with gunk-spewing traffic to foul the air.

  • New York Times

    • China Praises Its Progress Toward Olympics - newyorktimes.com
      August 6, 2007 - With a year remaining before the 2008 Olympics open here, Beijing officials on Monday gave an upbeat progress report about their preparations, even as critics warn that China may fall short on Olympic commitments on the environment, human rights and press freedom.

Environment

China is at the forefront when examining the major environmental challenges that face the world today: primarily water pollution, land use, and resource conservation.

  • 10,000 Shovels: China's Urbanization and Economic Development
    Currriculum unit developed by the Stanford Program on International and Cross-cultural Education (SPICE), 2006. Since the late 1970s, China has experienced an unprecedented economic boom, and is today's fastest growing major economy. Its economic reforms of 1978 allowed large amounts of capital to flow within the country, spurring the economy into a period of breakneck growth.

  • "China Revs Up." NOVA: World in the Balance, PBS Series, 2004. Curriculum unit and DVD/VHS.
    Nova investigates the impact of forces that are radically changing populations in both rich and poor nations.

  • Choking on Growth: A series of articles and multimedia examining the impact of China's epic pollution crisis - newyorktimes.com
    The speed of China's rise as an economic power is unprecedented, as is the scale of its environmental problems.

  • "Planet in Peril." CNN Special Report.
    The most populous nation in the world is now also the largest emitter of carbon dioxide, the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency said in a recent study. Air pollution in China is a major problem, caused in large part by the nation's immense thirst for coal-powered energy and the skyrocketing use of cars.

  • In Chinese Dam's Wake, Ecological Woes - washingtonpost.com
    November 15 - It was in this little village clinging to cliff sides over the Yangtze River that the environmental costs of China's Three Gorges Dam began to add up, a down payment on what experts predict will be billions of dollars and years of struggle to contain the damage.

  • China Not Fighting Off E-Waste Nightmare - washingtonpost.com
    November 19 - The air smells acrid from the squat gas burners that sit outside homes, melting wires to recover copper and cooking computer motherboards to release gold. Migrant workers in filthy clothes smash picture tubes by hand to recover glass and electronic parts, releasing as much as 6.5 pounds of lead dust.

  • Foreign Affairs - The Great Leap Backward? - foreignaffairs.org
    China's environmental woes are mounting, and the country is fast becoming one of the leading polluters in the world. The situation continues to deteriorate because even when Beijing sets ambitious targets to protect the environment, local officials generally ignore them, preferring to concentrate on further advancing economic growth. Really improving the environment in China will require revolutionary bottom-up political and economic reforms.

Democracy & Political Change

Questions surrounding the political reform and the emergence of civil sociey in China, include: How is online technology affecting political change in China? What pressures does the central government feel to institute reforms? Does international scrutiny as the Olympics approach play a role in political reform? How can we accurately teach about contemporary government and citizen participation in China? The below resources are avenues for exploration of these inquiries.

Recent Books in Resource Center:

Recent Articles:

  • John L. Thortnon, Long Time Coming: The Prospects for Democracy in China, Foreign Afffairs January/February 2008.
    Is China democratizing? The country's leaders do not think of democracy as people in the West generally do, but they are increasingly backing local elections, judicial independence, and oversight of Chinese Communist Party officials. How far China's liberalization will ultimately go and what Chinese politics will look like when it stops are open questions.

Websites:

Tibet and Recent Human Rights Issues

Given the recent issues in Tibet, human rights issues again take the forefront in China.

  • New York Times

    • Monks Disrupt Media Tour in China - newyorktimes.com
      April 9 - China suffered another unexpected public relations setback on Wednesday when Buddhist monks interrupted a government-managed news media tour in western China by waving a Tibetan flag and protesting that the authorities were depriving them of their human rights.

    • Tibet Will Reopen to Tourism After Protests
      April 4 - Tibet will be reopened to tourists on May 1, a decision announced Thursday even as authorities showed no sign of lifting restrictions preventing foreign journalists from freely visiting Tibet and other Tibetan regions in western China to report on episodes of ethnic unrest.

  • Washington Post

  • How to Think About Tibet - Opendemocracy.net
    March 31 - A greater understanding of Tibet's turmoil and possible future can be found in the experience of a small country in northwest Europe, says Donald S Lopez Jr.

  • Tibet, 228, and Ta-pa-ni: Some lessons for us all - thechinabeat.blogspot.com
    Based on the recent book about the Ta-pa-ni Incident (a colonial era uprising that changed the course of modern Taiwanese history), primary and secondary sources about the 228 Incident of 1947 , and current reporting and web/blogosphere debates about the tragic events in Tibet.

  • YouTube Propaganda War - danwei.org
    Is it the world's first international user generated propaganda war? Perhaps: the recent events in Tibet have provoked some strong reactions on the Internet, particularly on Youtube where adherents of both sides of the debate are fighting it out for top search rankings on the term 'Tibet' and 'China'. Currently, the top video for both search terms is is Tibet was, is and always will be a part of China, but there's a response to it called Tibet is not, was not, will never be a part of China.

  • New Yorker Review of the New Book on the Dalia Lama
    As Pico Iyer writes in his new book, "The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama" (Knopf; $24), it is easy to imagine that the Dalai Lama is "the plaything of movie stars and millionaires." Certainly, like all those who stress the importance of love, compassion, gentle persuasion, and other unimpeachably good things, the Dalai Lama can appear a bit dull.

  • Activists from Reporters Without Borders disrupt Olympic flame ceremony - shanghaiist.com
    March 25 - Three activists from Paris-based press-freedom group Reporters Without Borders, including its secretary-general Robert Ménard, managed to disrupt yesterday's Olympic flame ceremony by unfurling a banner showing the Olympic rings transformed into handcuffs in the middle of a speech by Mr Liu Qi, president of the Beijing organising committee and Beijing Communist Party Secretary.

  • At war with the utopia of modernity - www.guardian.co.uk
    March 22 - Tibetans' rage is directed not at communist rule, but the consumerist threat to their traditions and sacred lands. Last week many western commentators scrambling to interpret the protests in Lhasa found that they did not need to work especially hard. Surely the Tibetans are the latest of many brave peoples to rebel against communist totalitarianism?

  • Mountain forces: Two unusual new books analyse Tibet's turbulent past and its uncertain future - economist.com
    March 19 - China will not hear a word against its imperial claims to Tibet. Any criticism of how it behaves there draws a swift and sometimes brutal response from Beijing. That is what happened this month. On March 10th, the 49th anniversary of the first great uprising against China's military occupation, young Tibetans once again rose up against Chinese control and the takeover of Lhasa and other Tibetan towns by immigrant businessmen and workers.

  • China's Olympic Delusion - thenation.com
    March 19 - Karl Marx famously observed that history repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce. But when it comes to the periodic clashes between Tibetan protesters and China's authorities, tragedy is all one can see.

  • Fears and Tears - newsweek.com
    In an exclusive interview, the Dalai Lama talks to Newsweek about the violence in Tibet, his vision of the future - and how he manages to sleep in spite of his distress over the killings.

  • Human Rights Watch
    Despite China's official assurances that hosting the 2008 Olympic Games will help to strengthen the development of human rights in the country, the Chinese government continues to deny or restrict its citizens' fundamental rights, including freedom of expression, freedom of association, and freedom of religion.

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