The following courses will be offered during the Fall 2010 program. All course numbers provided are Skidmore course numbers. This list is subject to change.

All program participants enroll in the following REQUIRED course:

JCFC 205/209/363 - MANDARIN LANGUAGE IN CHINA (6 credits) Participants take classes at one of three levels from early intermediate to advanced, and study conversation, composition, grammar, and reading. Apart from classroom language instruction, students supplement classroom study with field trips, individual projects, and the use of Chinese in everyday life. Taught in Mandarin. Fulfills Foreign Language breadth requirement at Skidmore. Required of all students.

All program participants must also enroll in either the Field Studies or the for-credit Internship.

JCAS 301 - FIELD STUDIES (4 credits) Under the guidance of a faculty advisor at Skidmore, students design an independent research project before leaving for China. The faculty advisor must approve the final research proposal prior to the beginning of the program. Possible topic areas include business ethics and cultural differences, Chinese religion(s), environmental issues, China’s mass media, gender and Chinese modernity, family in contemporary China, the role of science in Chinese culture, etc. The project is directed and supervised by the course instructor. Taught in English. Fulfills Non-Western breadth requirement at Skidmore.

JCIN 100: INTERNSHIP SEMINAR (3 credits)
This internship seminar course provides not only a series of seminars with theoretical understanding of the corporate working cultures of China, but also hands-on working opportunity with an intern placement matching students' interests. The seminar is designed to help interns understand and integrate themselves into a Chinese-based work environment. Seminars will be given by experienced professionals or expatriates from a spectrum of organizations, including non-profit organizations, business companies, and universities. With their knowledge, students may discuss the phenomenon and practices related to workplaces, making sense of the cultural, social, and political influence at large. Taught in English.(IES course number- IN395.)

Additionally, participants enroll in TWO of the following courses:

JCMB 325 - DOING BUSINESS IN CHINA (3 credits)
This intensive course examines the business environment in China and its commercial, legal, organizational, and cultural dimensions. In the United States the business success system is “x+y=z”, but in China that equation for success is modified to “x+y+?=z?”. In this course, students focus on the “?” and through guest lecturers, projects, field study, readings, and discussion learn how to handle this uncertainty in the Chinese business environment. Taught in English. Fulfills Non-Western breadth requirement at Skidmore. (IES course number- IB/MG325.)

JCEC 310 - CONTEMPORARY CHINESE ECONOMY (3 credits)
Prerequisite: EC 236 - Microeconomics Theory.
This course introduces students to the present-day economy of China, focusing on the reform and transitional issues. The central themes in this course are involved with popular questions such as: Why can Chinese economy grow so rapidly? Is this fast growth sustainable? What kind of the role does the government play in China’s economic transition? And what kind of challenges China faces? Answers to these questions are usually not simple. This course therefore provides a framework for students to understand and analyze economic issues in a transitional economy like China. The course starts with a brief review of China’s economic history and basic elements of a socialist, centrally planned economy in the perspective of comparative economic systems. After analyzing various major transition issues, including the ownership reforms, the power and the limit of market forces and the necessities and difficulties in establishing market-oriented institutions. We conclude this course by summarizing transition experiences and deriving lessons from those valuable experiences. Students are required to work on an individual or term research project. At the end of the semester, each group will submit their term paper with their research findings. Marks will be mainly based on the insights that the paper brings. It is therefore very important to develop a coherent, convincing and logically correct analytical framework in the research paper. Taught in English. Fulfills Cultural Diversity breadth requirement at Skidmore. (IES course number- EC310.)

JCGO 365 - GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS OF CHINA (4 credits)
This course is an introduction to contemporary politics of China, which mainly addresses current policy making issues in Chinese government. We will review briefly the pre-reform government policy and structure in a beginning class session, and then start addressing current policy making issues. We will make our focus on the last 20 years of the reform period in Chinese policy-making issues. The goal of the course is to let students familiarize themselves with the basic issues of the policy process in China today and gain a better understanding of the changing scenarios of policy-making processes in different arenas and relevant to questions such as: How do Chinese political institutions operate? How are Chinese political leaders chosen? How are policies made? etc. Desired learning outcomes of the course would be that students should be able to: 1) Identify major issues of government policy and structure; 2) Understand and recount the objective conditions and cultural constructs that lie at the root of Chinese policy issues and decision making processes; 3) Identify the essence of the policies now being followed; and 4) develop analytic skills in explaining political practices in China. Taught in English. Fulfills Cultural Diversity breadth requirement at Skidmore. (IES course number- GO315.)

JCAR 264F - CHINESE CALLIGRAPHY (2 credits)
This course is an intensive studio-based program designed to acquaint students with Chinese calligraphy as a traditional and modern art form through practical mastery of its techniques. As the study of calligraphy also includes the history, meaning and evolution of Chinese characters, the course provides considerable support to Chinese language study for students at all levels. Students begin by being introduced to the traditional “four treasures of the study”: the writing brush, the ink stick, paper, and the ink stone. Having learned to prepare their own ink, they are taught how to hold the brush, and how to form the basic strokes. Students initially study Kai Shu, the modern official script, learning the strokes of one of the Kai Shu master works. Students will also be introduced to Li Shu (clerical script), Zhuan Shu (seal script), to the running hand (xing) and the cursive hand (cao.) Students will learn to imitate the scripts of eminent calligraphers. If they make sufficient progress, by the end of the course they will begin actual writing training, writing passages from one word to four words in length. The course will culminate in an exhibit of student work. Taught in English. Fulfills Arts breadth requirement at Skidmore. (IES course number- AR180).