Assignment 1:
After finishing this week’s readings( the readings are upload below in the attachments as Reader1-3& Reader 4-5), please focus this week’s post on the questions below.
Remember: the idea here is to think carefully about the questions, but you don’t need to worry as much about producing a perfectly polished text. Your post should be a few sentences for each question and please write this post on your own before you look at your classmates’ posts. I want you to first think independently.
1. What’s one idea about this week’s lectures and readings that you found most intriguing or surprising? Why is it intriguing or surprising to you?
2. Violence played an important role in the Manchu conquest of China proper. In the city of Yangzhou, Chinese men resisted the Manchus for days. How did the author portray the Manchus in this event? From whose perspective was this story told? (Please link this with reading#2 to get a better idea.) How would you describe the process of the Manchu conquest?
3. For readings #4 and 5, what type of behavior are the speaker and the writer promoting in their lectures and writings? The purpose? Do they believe it is easy for people to learn to be civil to one another? What assumption do they make about human nature? Do you agree with these assumptions
Assignment 2: Debate paper: The Success of the Qing
5 PAGES MINIMUM!!
You need to write both authors( Ho & Rawski) in the paper and try your best to flesh out the validity and importance of that particular author’s points.!
Your textbook, the three PDF documents, and our readings in the reader should be your sources. Make sure to use concrete evidence for your arguments and cite them properly.( Except reader1-3 and reader 4-5, all the left 6 attachments are for the debate paper)
This paper is to train you to read secondary sources critically and to think as a historian. You are going to be reading three articles: Ho Ping-ti 1967, Rawski 1996, and Ho Ping-ti 1998.
The central question debated here is about the success of the Qing. These two authors gave their arguments and provided their evidence. Their arguments were very different. In this Review/Debate paper, I want you to:
1) accurately summarize their arguments on the success of the Qing
2) enumerate the main evidence/ primary sources they used
3) point out the limitation of their arguments
4) offer your verdict of this debate. (Of course, you can apply all the knowledge you have accumulated up to this point to help you reach that verdict.)
In addition, 5) One term came up a lot in this debate is “Sinicization.” Please make sure to think about this term and look at how these two authors used the term.
I want you to have at least 1 paragraph to cover these 5 important points.
