Detailed Class Information :: www.AlbanyAdultSchool.org

Instructor: Duo Wang
Class Description: From Opium Wars to the Cultural Revolution
In this ten-week course, Duo Wang will lead the class through the contemporary history of China over a period of three hundred years by analysis of events and lives of influential figures. He will use illustrations, images, and video clips, along with his personal experiences, which would give a historic perspective to travelers, business people or anyone interested in China to help them with further study.

Brief history: In 1840, the first Opium war resulted in Britain seizing Hong Kong from China marking the beginning of her 100 years de facto colonial era. It took place in the midst of the Qing dynasty when China had expanded to its largest territory since the Mongol regime in the 13th century. When the Republic of China forced the last emperor to abdicate at the Forbidden City in 1911, not only did she end the last dynasty of China but also dynastic rule in "the Middle Kingdom" going back three-and-one-half millennia. The founding father, Sun Yat-sen, did not live long enough to solidify the Republic under his doctrine of governance known as "Three People's Principle." But his disciple Chiang Kai-shek reunited the nation from differing factions of warlords, and during World War II, fought the Japanese invasion with American backing.

Meanwhile Kiang, with an iron fist, tried relentlessly to eliminate the Communist Red Army led by Mao Zedong. At the end of WWII, Mao's communist forces of one million soldiers, with not much equipment but a lot of discipline, high spirits and the peasants' support, defeated Chiang's Guomindang army of three million troops supplied with American equipment. Chiang retreated to Taiwan, then known as Formosa. But since 1949 Mao proclaimed the establishment of the People's Republic of China in the Chinese mainland. The new republic has suffered many political and economic upheavals, among which the Cultural Revolution was the longest and the most destructive, lasting ten years and ending with Mao's death in 1976.

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