I was reading through CSM today and there was a cover article entitled "China's messages to quell unrest" basically discussing how the Communist Party is trying to tap into various traditions .
"As Chinese leaders fret over rising peasant protests, political instablility, and a decay of traditional values, the Communist Party is experimenting with mulitple new messges--designed to capture the hearts and minds of ordinary people."

According to the article, the Communist Party is backing various campaigns such as opening a department of Confucianism at People's University, holding a Buddhist forum.

China has become a 'consumer Communist Party...a party based on marketing, not Maoism.'
I think this is especially important in the cities like Beijing that are preparing themselves for the 2008 Olympics, with the huge skyscrapers in the sky and turning into a completely modern city.

The article also states that "daily life and 'public space' continues to diversify. I wonder if that can be seen through the current architecture. I wonder if the architecture in a city is being modernized and constructed if that is also representational of what's going not only in the city with change, but also with the people who live in that city?

I have to recommend a book that is not about China but does address our topic of study. It is called Breaking Ground: Adventures in Life and Architecture by Daniel Libeskind. Libeskind is the architect selected to design the structure/memorial that will be built in the Twin Towers site. The book is a fascinating look into an architect's mind: as Libeskind mentions, buildings are like literature: "a great building--like great literature or poetry or music--can tell the story of the human soul" (Libeskind 4). He details many of his projects, from the Twin Towers project to a Jewish museum in Germany. In Libeskind's buildings, symbols and structure create a mood, a feeling, that he wants to convey. What will China's buildings convey: a desire for power? for control? for order? organization? routine? community? This book sounds like a great complement to what we will be studying in Chinese buildings! Libeskind puts it this way, "From the ruins of Byzantium to the streets of New York, from the peaked roof of a Chinese pagoda to the spire of the Eiffel Tower, every building tells a story, or better yet, several stories" (3).[Edit by="tsprague on Jun 24, 4:15:48 PM"][/Edit]

I must admit I have several lesson plans brewing, but here is my idea for one that connects to our group's study: it's actually something I've already been working on, but I want to incorporate what I find in China to this lesson. The concept is this: in order for students to become deeper readers/thinkers (in history or in English) they need to encounter and understand not one text, but several. In other words, learning is an intertextual process. (Not my idea, obviously; find out more at NCTE.org: search David Bloome for the article). Here's my spin on this intertextual idea: I want students to understand that the skills that they develop while reading/analyzing literature are the same skills they will use when reading art, reading buildings, reading people--essentially, reading literature is making them better readers of the world. So, I try to bring in texts other than the piece of literature that we're reading for students to analyze (and to connect to the original text). The term "text" is used very loosely here: a text is anything that can be read/analyzed; anything that a "writing" can be created from--this definition allows for objects, paintings, toys, games, advertisements, my grandmother's quilt (another story) to be defined as texts. So students might look at a short story about grief, and then look at a mask that an African might wear to a funeral to show his/her grief--then students are asked to find a connection between the two, or better yet, students are asked to communicate what insight the second text (the mask) might give them into the first text (the short story). I've explored the same process with paintings: my students have traveled to the Latin American Museum of Art, on the hunt for paintings with a similar theme as one in The Great Gatsby, or for a painting in which the artist used a similar technique (like repetition) that Toni Morrison uses in Beloved. When encountering multiple texts, instead of focusing on one, students are challenged to think more deeply, to make more connections, to see relevance in their studies.
What's my point? Thank you if you're still reading. I want to find other "texts" in China that I can share with students, and that they can connect with texts that we are already reading in class. I am looking for three types of texts: ones that communicate grief (for my Thanatology class); ones that reveal something about Chinese culture (for my World Humanities class); ones that require the reader to use the language of literature (ie texts that cannot be discussed without using literary terms: juxtaposition, motif, symbol, theme, irony, mood, tone, etc: of course, this type of text will be used in all of my classes).
Now I said that this had some relevance to our topic of study: it does. I think that a lot of what I'll be able to use will come from Chinese/Japanese buildings: temples, political structures, etc. Power--a theme that is ubiquitous in literature--will be a theme that we find among the political structures in China. I'm sure that the trip will be full of intertextual moments!