Master
2024/2025
Post-Totalitarian China and Political Economy of Transition
Type:
Elective course (Socioeconomic and Political Development of Modern Asia)
Area of studies:
Asian and African Studies
Delivered by:
School of Asian Studies
When:
1 year, 2 module
Mode of studies:
offline
Open to:
students of one campus
Master’s programme:
Socioeconomic and Political Development of Modern Asia
Language:
English
ECTS credits:
3
Contact hours:
36
Course Syllabus
Abstract
The course has its focus on the market reforms and socio-political restructuring in the People’s Republic of China against the background of the history and outcomes of market reforms introduced in East-European former socialist countries and the USSR in the second part of the XX century. It is impossible to understand adequately the “Chinese reform miracle” outside the context of socialist systems’ internal evolutions in other countries. The course elaborates on the common systemic features of Marxist-Leninist “state socialist system” as well as on the “Chinese characteristics” of its version in the PRC. Students will get the knowledge of World historiography of these subjects, the concepts of “reforms” in socialist systems, their scope, dynamics, structure, potential and outcomes. Special attention is devoted to substantial structural differences between “totalitarianism” and “authoritarianism” and the concept of “post-totalitarian society” as a genetic offspring of “classical totalitarianism” thus being different from “authoritarianism”. Course elaborates on political economy of socio-economic and political change in “state socialist systems” with special focus on the constellation of pro-reform and counter-reform systemic players and the differences of this constellation from that one in classical “authoritarian” models. Another special focus of the course – political economy of financial sector reforms in the “reforming” socialist countries (especially – today’s China) and systemic reasons for prolonged macroeconomic instability going hand in hand with the attempts to bring more market coordination into the state socialist economy.