Looking back on this course and everything that has been covered I feel like I learned a lot. I had a little bit of base knowledge from other courses or experiences on the culture and happenings of contemporary China, but I felt like my knowledge of ancient China and the transition from dynasty rule to a functional government was shoddy at best. But with everything that I have learned, I think the most important information that I have learned is in between two weeks of material, weeks 11 and 11. Week 14 and the environment pertain the most to contemporary China while week 11 and the Great Leap Forward show a very important developmental time in China’s history and a massive humanitarian crisis. The learning on the environment did two very important things for me it exposed me more to the rural life of people in China, as that is something I have rarely seen, and it gave me a better idea of the interworkings of the country. I plan to highlight this in my final show and tell project, as the efforts of the environmentalist were really something else but the dam at Tiger Leaping Gorge was ultimately approved in 2019 so something has happened to change the government’s focus and allow the dam to proceed.
Week 11 and the Great Leap Forward was something that was interesting to me partially because of how crucial of a time it was in China’s history but also how infuriating the situation was with hindsight. I really felt that the famine that resulted from the Great Leap Forward was really a product of poor planning, foresight, and neglectful or detached leadership. As I talked about in my show and tell project 4, the responsibility and blame for the famine fall squarely on the shoulders of the party and Mao himself, as they had the ability to correct the situation while it was occurring but did nothing. They saw the peasant lives as expendable, something that I found did not match the ideals of the party very well, but as a result of this Mao had to step down. The idea of the Great Leap Forward and its policies were only made worse in my mind by the environment documentary and all of the ecological fallout that occurred as a result of massive terraforming projects such as filling in lakes and of the battle of man to tame nature through the 4 pests. It just solidified in my mind how bad of an idea the whole thing was and to hear that it had little support within the party but Mao went ahead with it anyways added to the frustration. But I think this topic was one of the most important if not the most important because of its placement during a critical time in China’s development, their infancy stages as a country where they could have collapsed. Additionally, the future ramifications seem very large, they’re evident within the environment in modern times which is something I’ll briefly look at in my last Show and Tell, but the social fallout remains in the country where it is taboo to talk about it.
Overall I thought I got a lot out of the course, I feel like the knowledge I gained intersects well with the cultural knowledge from the magical creature’s course and helps build upon some cultural and historical knowledge I’ve picked up through Chinese language courses. I think if I could reverse time and do things over I would take this course before any Chinese language courses as I think it would be cool to talk to my professors about historical events I was learning about and see if they had an opinion about them. I think this course provided me with a large base of information that I can carry over to other courses in the Asian Studies minor, it was a really fun and fruitful semester.
