For long, 1949 marked a boundary that historians of China did not transgress. The post-1949 years were almost exclusively the domain of political scientists, sociologists, economists, and anthropologists. But over the last twenty years, spurred by the increasing openness of national and local archives, historians have offered new and compelling perspectives on the early years of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). By 2007, enough new work had emerged for the Mao era (1949-1976) to be posited as its own period of historical enquiry. Since then, the trend has only gathered steam. While...

More than any other country in the recent past, China has attempted to solve its problems through massive, mostly state-led projects of technological and social transformation. Whether it is the construction of dams, railways, and special economic zones, or the mobilization of entire populations during the Great Leap Forward and the one-child policy, the Chinese have consistently sought solutions by going big. In this seminar, we shall examine a variety of such MEGA projects as a window onto some of the central themes in twentieth century Chinese history: state-society relations,...