PSC 31189

About this course

This course examines China as a lens to explore central questions in comparative politics and international relations, from democratization to the political economy of development and great power transitions. We first study China's state formation and its imperial heritage. We then turn to its domestic politics, asking why China did not democratize despite entering a modernization era; how its elite politics unfolded; what forms of federalism it adopted; and how local-national interplay, forms of repression, and ethnic conflicts play out. We then reverse the lens to examine China's effects abroad: on populism in wealthy democracies, on development in the Global South, and on international norms and the global order. No prior knowledge of China is required.