Title:   Shaking up the System:  China's Response to the 19th Century International System of Trade and Diplomacy

Speaker:   Dr. Howard Spendelow

Topic/Issues:  

1. Consolidation of the Unequal Treaty System
2. Imperialist competition and the "Scramble for Concessions"
3. First responses: new institutions and the "Coöperative Policy"
4. "Self-Strengthening" and its limitations
5. Conservative backlash and the "Ili Crisis" of 1879-1881
6. New challenges from Japan
7. China as the "Sick Man of Asia"
8. Radical reform from the "top down"
9. Reactionary backlash and the Boxers

Resources:

1. China's Revolutionary Century, part II
2. Foreign policy debate and the Ili Crisis
3. China's Revolutionary Century, part III

Readings:

1. Cohen, Paul A.  History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth (Columbia UP, 1997)
2. Hunt, Michael H.  "The American Remission of the Boxer Indemnity: A Reappraisal", Journal of Asian Studies XXXI.3 (May 1972) pp. 539-559.

Goals:

1. [tbd]