With the fall of the Qing empire in 1911, modern China was faced with the challenge of finding ways to build itself anew, politically, economically, socially and culturally. This course will examine China’s myriad experiments with new political systems, new modes of thought, new ways of organizing its political economy and radically reconfiguring its society. The course starts with the fall of the Qing empire and moves into the Republic and the PRC period to end with the post-Mao period. The class traces China’s shift from empire to nation-state and then, to Party-state. In addition to a chronological coverage, the course also sheds light on China’s negotiation of a new and shifting global order, paying particular attention to circuits of imperialism, science and capitalism, and more recently, neo-liberalism. It introduces important historiographical debates centering on nationalism, revolution and citizenship, ethnicity, imperialism and de-colonization, industrialization, the cold war and the Cultural Revolution. Different methodological approaches will be considered. Students will compare a social history approach with cultural history, contrast studies of longue duree with microhistory, and examine studies that take as a central point of analysis class, gender, race, and/or science, technology and medicine.