[MUSIC] Hi, in this module, I'm going to be talking about change in continuity in China and social science research related to that. As we all know, China has experienced tremendous change during the 20th century. At the same time, it has also experienced profound continuities. So when it comes to politics, the economy and society in many ways, China's fundamentally different from the way it was at the beginning of the 20th century. And yet, in other ways, there are long standing continuities and understanding and explaining these changes in continuities is an essential task for researchers doing social science in China at this time. Just to highlight some of the big changes that have taken place in the 20th century, the economy grew and trade has increased. This has been especially imperant in the last 20 or 30 years. Health has improved, people are living much longer and infants, and children are much less likely die while they're young. Migration has become common. Millions of people are on the move, moving from the countryside to the cities in search of opportunities. This has affected both the countryside and the cities. The family has changed. The family in China today is very different from what it was 20 years ago, 50 years ago or certainly a hundred years ago. Many customs and practices have altered completely while there are still important continuities. And finally, with important implications for society and the economy, education has become widespread. Just to highlight some of the remarkable economic change that has taken place in China in recent decades, this is a plot of GDP per capita for China at the bottom there compared to some other wealthier countries. So, one of the long standing questions for people studying China has been why the economy appeared to grow slowly in the past? Now there are of course, debates about what went on in the distant past, but it appears that for much of the 20th century, China was poorer than many of the wealthiest western countries and the economy was not growing as quickly as they were. Conversely, another big topic has been understanding why China's economy is growing so quickly in recent decades, especially since the 1980s. While in many ways, China's remarkable story in the last few decades of economic growth resembles that of other East Asian in Southeast Asian countries and regions since the middle of the 20th century. Nevertheless, there are important differences. Understanding the similarities and differences with the experience of other countries and regions and then understanding the implications is an essential task in social science research on China. Just to highlight again, how much the Chinese economy has changed just in the last few decades, here we look at China's trade with the outside world. So until just a few decades ago, China had very little trade with the outside world. And in connection with that, especially before the 1980s, relatively little social and political and other contact of the sort that often occupies trade. But in the last few decades, there have been enormous increases. So if we go back just a few decades ago, China only exchanged roughly $12.59 billion worth of goods with the outside world. But more recently, it's been exchanging hundreds of billions of dollars worth of goods every year and it's one of the most important trading countries in the whole world. This has had important implications for China's society for its economy and its politics, and it's indeed had a huge influence on the rest of the world. Now, there are a few really big questions that people confront when they're researching China in the contemporary era. One is, going back into history, how much did China actually change? How much did its politics, its society and it's economy change in the first half of the 20th century? In the past, it used to be commonly assumed that there was very little change before the 1950s and that the early 20th century in China, in many ways was maybe not that much of an improvement over the 19th century. There are new debates and new evidence though, about changes that took place in the early 20th century and there's a lot of social science research trying to understand the nature of these changes. And then to understand how some of these changes may have led to continuities into the late 20th century and other things that represented differences in the late 20th century. Along those lines, there's a lot of research now on trying to figure out after 1949, during the founding of People's Republic of China, how much of what happened represented a fundamental break from the past? Not just from the first half of the 20th century that we just talked about, but also a break from more deep rooted and longer standing patterns that go back centuries or millennia? And how much of what we saw after 1949 actually represented continuity? There's also a lot of interest in understanding the long-term implications of some of the tumult, the big changes, the events of the 1950s, the 1960s and the 1970s. Obviously, this period in China was marked by some important transformations, massive events that affected almost everybody in the population. There's a lot of social science research now, trying to look at how these events influenced people years or decades later. How did they influence the people that were children at the time that these events took place? And how has it affected their subsequent participation in the labor force, their education and other factors? And finally, and perhaps one that gets the most attention, just because of China's incredible role in the world in the recent years, is understanding the causes and consequences of rapid economic growth in China since the 1980s. I just showed you how China's economy has grown tremendously quickly since the 1980s. This has had profound effects on society, the economy and on politics. Understanding the causes of this growth and the consequences remains an important task for social scientists, and it will be a central task for social scientists in the coming decades.
