Chinese

Economic development affects the living standards and options of people. The question of why some countries grow much faster than others is perhaps the central question in the study of development. This course approaches this question by reviewing and explaining the logic behind the most important arguments that have been advanced to account for differences across countries in rates and levels of economic development. The emphasis is on the studies of growth (both theoretical models and empirical work), population structure, inequality, poverty, fiscal policies, financial development and trade.

This course studies and interprets political issues in the Middle East. Topics include its geographical position, historical evolution, civilization, development, relationship between church and state, religion, revolution and reform, war and peace, and oil economy. The course combines a realistic perspective of theory with practice.

This course is an introduction to the basic content of strategic communication of various organizations (local, global, business, social) in China. Based on the theoretical viewpoints and constituent elements in the fields of strategic management, public relations, organizational communication and marketing communication, this course introduces the core ideas, viewpoints, components, subject nature of the new research direction of strategic communication, and emphasizes its development in China.

This course takes discourses on popular culture as its point of departure to discuss the cultural meaning and reverberation of popular culture today. As a dominant cultural phenomenon and force, popular culture has infiltrated into our everyday life and helped shape our identity and worldview. Within the critical tradition on popular culture, there has been a heated debate with regard to the pros and cons of popular culture in terms of cultural politics: to what extent is popular culture reinforcing the dominant stereotypes of gender, sexuality, race, and class? And to what extent can popular culture subvert or even intervene dominant cultural hegemony? This course provides an opportunity to look into how popular culture is constructed and appropriated in tandem with its potential to disrupt practices of dominant cultural hegemony. Key texts on popular culture are read closely, and students will be encouraged to investigate practices of contemporary popular culture that are of interest to them. To make students familiar with key concepts of popular culture and cultivate the ability to analyze forms of contemporary popular culture with a critical perspective.

The purpose of this course is to provide learners with an overview of asset pricing and asset allocation—how economic actors (individuals, organizations) allocate their limited wealth or resources to diversified financial assets such as stocks, bonds, and derivatives, in order to obtain a reasonable cash flow and risk-return characteristics. The course is divided into four parts. The first part covers fundamentals of investment, which focuses on the research object, meaning, process, markets, and instruments of the investment. Part two covers the capital market equilibrium theory and includes the mean-variance theory, capital asset pricing model (CAPM), exponential model and the arbitrage pricing theory (APT), the efficient market hypothesis (EMH), and behavioral finance theory. Part three consists of the analysis and valuation of securities. This section introduces the valuation and analysis of three categories of financial instruments, fixed-income securities, equity securities, and derivative securities. Part four covers fund investment management and performance evaluation. After the valuation of investment instruments, the next procedures are assets allocation according to the risk appetite of different investors, investment funds management, portfolio management, and investment performance evaluation.

This course examines common data structures and their implementation, including stack, queue, string, binary tree, tree and graph; common retrieval, indexing and sorting methods, including linear table, hash table, inverted file, B-tree and other common retrieval and indexing technologies, insertion sorting, shell sorting, heap sorting, quick sorting, cardinal sorting and other common sorting algorithms and their time and space overhead; common algorithms and their implementation, including divide and conquer, recursion, backtracking, greedy method.

The course is designed from the perspective of cultivating digital art design and creative thinking abilities, and presents the basic knowledge and practical methods of digital art design, and enhances aesthetic appreciation and practical ability to adapt to the broader visual culture environment in the future.

This course revolves around the three topics that Kant focuses on (scientific knowledge, morality, beauty and natural purpose) and four related questions (what can we know? What should we do? What can we hope? In the final analysis, what is a person?), based on Kant's three major "critiques."

This general education course explores the interactive relationship between literature and history. The course examines nine works from Shakespeare related to British history, and organizes teaching activities around these works. The course guides students through the original works, introduces relevant history, and the interactive relationship between history and literature, and  organizes course discussions and performance activities.

The course consists of reading and analyzing modern Chinese prose, short stories, poetry. The course requires in-class writing assignments and discussions, a presentation, as well as a creative writing assignment.