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East Asia Resource Center, Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington

Dream of Ding Village: Crises and Controversies in Contemporary China – Online NCTA Seminar

Zhang Ziyi and Aaron Kwok in Love for Life (2011), a film adaptation of Dream of Ding Village by Yan Lianke. While the film is not part of the workshop materials, it offers a visual interpretation of the novel’s themes.

In this online seminar, we explored literary texts from the Chinese reform era and new millennium as a lens for examining the consequences of China’s rapid modernization.

Each week focused on a different contemporary crisis and include a secondary reading related to that topic. Our anchoring novel for the seminar was Yan Lianke’s Dream of Ding Village (2006), a socially critical novel that chronicles the medical, moral, and ecological decline of a fictional Chinese “AIDS village.”

Class meetings included a lecture component that provided an overview on Chinese history from the reform era to the present as well as additional context for understanding various social, political, and environmental crises in contemporary China. Participants were provided with discussion questions in advance and invited to share their own questions and insights during the second half of each session.

The class met bi-weekly for two-hour sessions to allow participants adequate time to read and prepare their response papers. Participants were required to write two one-page response papers (double-spaced, 12 pt font) and a final project that includes designing a lesson plan around a contemporary Chinese crisis or controversy.

Schedule Overview:

  • Monday, Nov 3, 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM (Pacific Time): Authoritarian Politics and the Search for Meaning

  • Monday, Nov 17, 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM (Pacific Time): HIV/AIDS Epidemic

  • Monday, Dec 1, 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM (Pacific Time): Migration and Inequality

  • Monday, Dec 15, 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM (Pacific Time): Environmental Degradation

All sessions took place online on Zoom.

Program Benefits

Program Leader

Elise Huerta is a cultural studies scholar and educator who specializes in modern and contemporary China. Her research explores the cultural politics of touch in modern Chinese literature, film, and visual culture. She holds a PhD in East Asian Languages & Cultures from Stanford University and a BA in Asian Languages & Cultures from the University of Michigan. Dr. Huerta currently serves as Editor of Education About Asia, the flagship pedagogy journal published by the Association for Asian Studies.

This program was sponsored by the East Asia Resource Center at the University of Washington and funded by a Freeman Foundation grant in support of the National Consortium for Teaching about Asia (NCTA)