Asian Studies

This is a knowledge-based course introducing the Chinese language and culture. Contents include theories and applications concerning the Chinese language and culture; theories, practices, and situations of teaching and learning Chinese as a second language (including Putonghua and Cantonese learning); the importance of culture in Chinese as a second language; and the language policies and its use in Hong Kong and in Mainland China.

This course looks at the evolution of modern China's political and economic system; the Chinese state in comparative perspective; issues and problems of China's political and economic development. This course explains the Chinese political system and state administration, the characteristics of China's socialist market economy, and analyses the role of the Communist Party of China. Students assess different theoretical approaches used in current research on modern China, and develop and present individual research interests on China's political system.

This course adopts multi-disciplinary perspectives to examine significant and complex issues of China in the past and present. With a general survey of China, this course discusses China’s historical development, revolutionary past, cultural traditions, formal political structure, the market-oriented economic reform, and geographic, demographic and linguistic diversity, as well as contemporary issues of environment, resistance and mass media. Central themes throughout the course include China’s cultural identity, ethnicity, state-society relations, continuities and changes in China’s socio-political values, and China’s role in the global order. The purpose of this course is to provide students with a base of knowledge of China’s historical and contemporary experiences and contexts. 

This course examines an aspect of Thai social life often overlooked although central to the everyday practical lives and visual experiences of Thais. The Buddha image presiding over the Vihara, or Ubosot of a temple, almost always has a name and a story connected to it. The belief and ritual practices surrounding the image make it a practically central component of the life of a Buddhist community.  

And yet such images have scarcely excited much interest beyond the descriptive art historical approach. This selected topic explores the Buddha Images of Thailand and evaluates the power that these images have over what it means to be a member of a community, of what it means to be Thai and what it means to exert power, how they connect the faithful not only with a Buddhist past in northern India but with histories of local communities and great kingdoms alike.  

Above all, Buddha Images of Thailand offers another way to view the landscape of Thailand as sacred geography or Buddhascape. Although an art historical approach is utilized, this course foregrounds and examines the social and political aspects of the image, placing it in its wider historical context. 

This course examines tombs from the Neolithic period to the Yuan dynasty with a focus on the period between the 2nd and the 14th century to examine their artistic, religious, and social significance.

This course examines Chinese literature from the Song Dynasty to the late Qing Dynasty. The course will help students gain an understanding of cultural history and the internal development of literary history. Students will gain basic knowledge about Chinese literary works in this course knowledge and understanding of the relationship between historical conditions and literary production.

This is a course in an all-round way to review Chinese history from ancient times to the Qing Dynasty. The students will know the outline of ancient Chinese history and be interested in it. 

This course examines Hong Kong’s culture and its people from an anthropological perspective. Through close readings of ethnographies, viewing of videos, and fieldtrips, the class explores the interaction of different cultural flows in various social systems, and learns about the linkage between the past and the present, the local and the global, and the Chinese and the rest. 

The course examines the representation of modern China in both literature and film from the cultural renaissance of the 1910s and 1920s, through the upheavals of the Sino-Japanese War. Topics covered include the emancipation of women, youth and age, sex and love, literature and dissent, literature and power. The course stresses the close ties that have existed between the worlds of literary and cinematic creativity throughout this period. The course develops insights into one of the world's major civilizations in its modern transformations; develops an understanding of 20th China through two of its chief modes of expression; and develops the communicative skills of writing and discussion.

The ‘Silk Roads’ are often considered to be the world’s greatest network of throughways that linked China to the Mediterranean world over land and sea. The historical development of Chinese culture and civilization cannot be scrutinized without a reflective understanding of the Chinese Empire’s dynamic interactions with the nomadic peoples and the Western world that were situated along the Silk Road. This course examines the geopolitical and cultural landscapes of Eurasia; the migration of peoples; as well as the spread of goods, religions, ideas, technologies, art and diseases between the East and the West. It explores the construction of an early form of globalization, and how it has contributed to the formation and dissolution of people’s ethnic, religious, linguistic and cultural identities. This course ends by examining Chinese government’s grand initiative 'One Belt One Road', and inquiring about the way in which the geopolitics of the Silk Road region in the past still exerts tangible and long-lasting impact on the world today.